Supernaturally Young Parent

It's a long story, okay?^{Short version}Basically, Cyclops sent his infant son into the distant future to save his life, and the baby grew up, became Cable, and time-traveled back to the present.

Due to Time Travel, Immortality, magic aging (or de-aging), a child looks significantly older than their biological parent, or at least far too old to be their child. This can occur on either side of the relationship; maybe it's a Kid from the Future, come to warn their parents about some apocalypse before they're even born. Or maybe the parent is The Ageless, and still looks twenty despite having a child thirty years ago. Regardless, this often leads to a Tangled Family Tree.

See also Absurdly Youthful Mother and the other subtropes, as well as Living Distant Ancestor. May lead to Outliving One's Offspring.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Blood+: Diva was 170+ years old when she gave birth to her daughters, but biologically sixteen.
• Chronos Ruler: Kiri and Viktor appear to be a pair of brothers who hunt Horologues, monsters that devour time. When victim of the week Koyuki learns that Viktor's time was stolen and he now ages in reverse, she initially assumes that the teenage Viktor is Kiri's Childish Older Sibling, only to learn that Viktor is Kiri's father.
• Arale and Obotchaman from Doctor Slump don't age due to being robots; therefore, they retain the same appearances they always had despite becoming parents.
• In Don't Meddle with My Daughter!, Point Blank is around Clara's age when he is sent back in time. He then fulfills a Stable Time Loop by adopting the identity of B.M. the Shooter aka Athena's husband and Clara's father. After spending a few years in the past, he is then sent forward in time one year past the date he was sent back, making him biologically a mere two years older than his daughter. Much to his dismay, she's reluctant to call someone who barely looks older than her "father".
• Dragon Ball:
  • Dragon Ball GT:
    • Goku is de-aged to childhood as the result of the Black Star Dragon Balls, making him approximately the same age as his granddaughter, 10-year-old Pan.
    • Even before that, Goku looked too young to be the father of his child Son Gohan (also keeping in mind that Gohan's own kid brother, Goten, is a teenager) but this is because Saiyans remain in their prime longer than humans. Neither Bulma nor Chi-Chi are thrilled, and you can guess how the latter reacts to her husband's further de-aging.
  • Also, Goku's age was stilted by about 8 years due to times he spent dead. And he was only 19 when Gohan was born to begin with.
  • Dragon Ball Z: Bulma to Future Trunks, her Kid from the Future. He even blushes upon seeing her once because he's surprised how much of a bombshell she was as a young woman.
  • Dragon Ball Super: Broly implies that Bulma uses the Dragon Balls to wish herself five years younger every few years.
• Fairy Tail:
  • Zeref and Mavis are ageless immortals who both look younger than their naturally aging son August who is an old man. In fact, a passing glance would make one believe August is their grandfather. Mavis in particular since she had her outward aging halted in her early teens.
  • Irene Belserion looks like she could be Erza Scarlet's sister rather than mother, but that's because Irene hasn't aged since the day she started turning into a dragon, she used her magic to prevent Erza's growth in her womb after transforming, and when she finally did give birth 400 years later it was only after she learned how to take a human form that was age-locked to her original human age pre-dragonification.
• Irisviel "Iri" von Einzbern is a Happily Married mother who looks like she is in her early twenties. Her daughter, Ilyasviel aka "Illya", looks like she is five, at the very most. During the main storyline of Fate/Zero, Irisviel's age is around nine when her daughter is eight. Justified, as they both are homunculi whose distorted growth rates make them look older and younger than they actually are, respectively.
• Conrad Gibbs of Goldfisch turns out to be one. Due to an accident with an immortality-granting artifact, he reverted to the same age as his son. Since he was being hunted for stealing the artifact, Conrad concluded that the safest way to still remain in his son's life was to pose as his long-lost twin brother, Spencer.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency has Lisa Lisa, mother of Joseph Joestar due to her mastery of Hamon energy making her age slowly. Joseph's brain nearly breaks when he discovers that his twenty-something Sexy Mentor is actually fifty.
  Joseph: If you were a baby fifty years ago... How old are you?
• Lyrical Nanoha has Hayate and the Wolkenritter, Hayate acts as a mother figure at age nine, while the Wolkenritter are likely centuries old. Their "official" ages in A's, most likely determined by physical appearance, are 8 for Vita, 19 for Signum and 22 for Shamal. Zafira seems to pose as the family dog.
• Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms: Maquia, a member of a virtually-immortal reclusive tribe in which Immortality Begins at Twenty, adopts a baby at age fifteen, which is the age at which the aging stops. By the time her adoptive son is a teenager, the two are pretending to be siblings when they move in a new place.
• RahXephon has Quon, Ayato's biological mother, who has been kept in stasis. Making her the same age as he is, and about half the age of his twin brother Itsuki (Ayato too was kept in a kind of stasis)
• Moka's mother Akasha in Rosario + Vampire is well over 200, but looked like she was in her early twenties (she looked like just like her daughter's good side, in fact). Justified, since Shinso Vampires are said to be immortal.
• In Sailor Moon, there's Chibiusa (who looks no older than 8, or 10 after she starts becoming Sailor Chibimoon) to Usagi (who is 14). Chibiusa is actually Usagi and Mamoru's Kid from the Future, born a few years later from the series' present day where the latter two have ascended to rule the world from Crystal Tokyo as Neo-Queen Serenity and King Endymion. Also, due to the extended lifespan of the future people, Chibiusa is actually 901.
• Mito from Space Pirate Mito looks like she's around 5 or 6 years old (though we don't find out about it later, since she wears a Mobile-Suit Human to look older), while her son is only about 15 when the series starts. Turns out she's Really a few thousand year-old alien who had a child with a human.
• In Star Driver, up until the reveal, the best evidence against the theory that Reiji Miyabe/Head was Takuto's father was that he didn't look like he was out of highschool himself, much less old enough to father a fifteen-year-old son. Turns out that he ages really well. Or not at all, apparently.
• Tenchi Muyo! has several of these, perhaps most notably Washu being Ryoko's mother, despite the fact that Washu actually looks younger than Ryoko. In actuality, while Ryoko is merely a child at 7,000 or so, Washu is, depending on who you ask, either 20,000 or older than the universe. She cheats via magical scientific age modification.

Art

• The Blessed Mother in Michelangelo Buonarroti's Pieta hardly looks like a middle-aged widow; she looks just as old as her 33-year old son. This dissonance between her appearance and age is intentional since Mary's unusual external beauty is a sign of her immaculate soul.

Comic Books

• Siahm in Arawn looks extremely youthful and voluptuous not only after going through two twin pregnancies, but even when her children reach adulthood and have kids of their own. There is a supernatural reason for it: she drank blood from their enemies' hearts, as her tribe's secret to extend their vitality and longevity, preventing their bodies from being destroyed by the ravages of time.
• In Big Bang Comics, the goddess Venus looks maybe 28, and has for thousands of years. For some reason her son Cupid, equally immortal, is white-haired and balding, looking twice his mother's apparent age if not older.
• Aaron and Wendy Rhodes, the main protagonist's parents in Birthright. As a result of being sent into another dimension where time flows slower than on Earth, their pre-teen son Michael returns home as fully-grown adult.Then his wife and infant daughter cross over after him.
  • After Aaron and Wendy spend six Earth months on Terrenos and their other, still teenage son Brennan relocates to Terrenos, the family on Earth now look more or less age appropriate: late fifites/early sixites grandparents, thirtysomething son and daughter-in-law, toddler grandaughter; but if anyone checks legal paperwork they're going to know something's up.
• Black Moon Chronicles: When Lucifer and his son Haazheel Thorn finally meet, the latter looks like a frail old man while the former like somebody in his prime. Lucifer of course is an immortal deity, while Haazheel has been aging normally for decades. Part of Lucifer's plans for Haazheel involves ascending him to full godhood in exchange for delivering the Earth to him.
• In Camelot 3000 King Arthur, who has been in magical suspended animation since the Middle Ages, looks at most ten years older than his reincarnated son Modred. Similarly, the reincarnated Galahad appears to be the same age as Lancelot, or possibly slightly older.
• The Post-Crisis Captain Atom was flung 18 years into the future by the experiment which gave him his powers. When he emerged in the year 1986, he was now around the same age as his children.
• Adam Destine of ClanDestine hasn't aged since the genie Elalyth made him invulnerable when was about twenty... eight hundred years ago. Since then, he and Elalyth have had a great many children, all of whom age normally until adulthood, then slow way down. Most of his children actually look older than him, except for the twins (twelve years old) and Samantha and maybe Dominic (who look about the same age as he does).
• When Darkseid is temporarily made into a baby he winds up being raised by his own daughter, Grail. He has several other adult children.
• Due to Comic-Book Time, this is pretty noticeable in a Parental Substitute way for a lot of DC Comics’ mentor/sidekick pairings. When the original Teen Titans were introduced in the Silver Age, they were in their early teens and their mentors were probably in their thirties. Skip forward to the modern era, the first generation of sidekicks have grown up and been replaced by multiple generations of new characters, while the heroes who were parental figures to them have at best aged only a couple of years.
  • Batman is consistently depicted as a man on the cusp of middle age, despite three of his four “sons” consecutively aging from boys to young men on his watch.
  • The Flash Family: When Wally West first became Kid Flash, he was a young teen and Barry Allen was a mature man. Now Bart Allen and Wallace West are about as old as Wally was back in the day, Wally is probably only a few years younger than Barry was when they met and has kids of his own, and Barry is if anything depicted as younger than he was in The '60s.
  • Green Arrow and Black Canary have barely aged a day since The '70s, despite Roy Harper growing up and having a kid of his own. It’s honestly kind of silly for Dinah to have a teenaged “granddaughter” and still be as beautiful and curvaceous as ever.
• In Femforce, the Super Serum that gave Joan 'Ms. Victory' Wayne her powers also caused her to stop aging at 27. As a result, she appears to be about the same age as her daughter Jennifer 'Rad' Burke.
• The Incredible Hulk: The organization known as The Pantheon is lead by centuries-old, but adolescent looking Agamemnon. His immortality kicked in while young. His many sons, grandsons and grand-grandsons looks older than him.
  • However, he usually takes the appearance of a towering old man with a long, white beard when he appears at the Pantheon.
• My School Chum Mum in the British comic Bunty involved a scientist who invents a miraculous anti-ageing cream that turns her into a 15-year-old, forcing her to go to school with her daughter so the welfare authorities will not ask questions.
• The Sandman (1989): In one volume it's remarked that Orpheus' mother doesn't seem old enough to be his mother. This is understandable, since she is Calliope, an immortal muse from Greek myth.
• Superman: In Superman's Return to Krypton, Superman goes back in time and meets his birth parents when they are a bit younger than him.
  Superman: "It's weird having a father who is practically your own age!"
• In Vampirella, Lilith and her descendants don't age beyond adulthood since they're either demons or demon-lite (vampires). In the Dynamite series there's a dinner scene in Hell where Lilith, her daughter Vampirella and son-in-law Adam Van Helsing, and her grandson Lukas Van Helsing are in the same room together. They all appear 30-something. Though in Lukas's case Time Travel was also involved, and Adam, while being a normal human, was technically dead at that point.
• Wanted: The immortal African supervillain Adam One (who looks about middle-aged) is briefly seen spending time at his oldest son's deathbed along with his other non-immortal descendants.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Diana's mother Hippolyta is immortal, and appears to be the same age as her young adult daughter. Given that in most continuities she's also Diana's Truly Single Parent it's understandable that they are occasionally mistaken for each other.
  • In Wonder Woman (1987) not only does Diana look the same age as her mother, her maternal grandfather Ares also looks to be in his twenties, though like Hippolyta he is much older than he looks.
  • Wonder Woman (Rebirth): Ares actually looks younger than his daughter Hippolyta, looking more like he's the same age as his granddaughter Diana. These family relations were muddled by later writers, but initially this stood.
• X-Men:
  • Cable is about twice the biological age of both his parents, Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor; he was born in the present but was spirited away and raised in a distant future. Additionally, his mother was a clone of Jean Grey, and chronologically only a couple of years old when he was born. (It's complicated)... Just remember that he's a time traveller. Things were further complicated with the introduction of Kid Cable, Cable's time-traveling teenaged self who is young enough to be Scott's kid and has taken up residence in the present.
  • Same goes for the other Grey-Summers children:
    • Nate Grey is alternate Cable/Cable's half-brother, as he's made from Scott and Jean's DNA by Sinister, grown to the age of 17, and now looks 20-something. Or he did. His skunk stripe, and later Mystical White Hair at the end of Age of X-Man makes it hard to tell what age he is - with the beard, he actually looked older than his mother. With the white hair, he just looked sort of ageless. Meanwhile, his parents are somewhere around 30. This tracks with Nate at one point lampshading this in New Mutants and noting that if you do as much dimension-shifting as he does, you end up with a dad only ten years older than you.
    • Rachel Summers is Scott and Jean's daughter, returned from a Bad Future that may or may not still occur. While there was at least a distinction between Rachel (a teenager) and Jean (a grown woman in her later 20s) in the late 80s/early 90s, Rachel ageing and Jean very much not means that they could now be sisters or even fraternal twins. To be fair, there's some justification for this: since then, Rachel spent some time in the future, and Jean has spent a lot of time dead.
    • And Stryfe, Cable's clone, is about Cable's age - though a teenage version recently appeared with Kid Cable in X-Force.
  • Ladies and gentlemen, Rachel Summers◊ meets◊ the timely-displaced (younger and teenage) version of her mother Jean Grey.
    • Later, she refers to Teen Jean as "Baby Mamma" and Tykelops as "Tyke Dad." It's transparently a coping mechanism (though she does like having them both around).
    • And later still, at Kitty and Colossus' wedding, one panel has the adult Jean disapprovingly remarking on her younger self drinking champagne, which Teen Jean dismisses as Adult Jean "momming" her and tells her that if she should be doing that to anyone, it's Rachel. Rachel, meanwhile, is in the middle and wishing for an alien invasion to end her mortification.
  • Both Cable and Rachel even attend Scott and Jean's wedding◊.
• In the Yoko Tsuno book The Three Suns of Vinea, Khany is reunited with her mother, who was put in suspended animation at the same age Khany is now. As a result, mother and daughter now have the same biological age, prompting the former to try to make things less awkward by insisting that Khany consider her her sister rather than her mother.
• In Young Justice, teenaged heroine Empress's parents were killed by her dad's archenemy (and father-in-law) Agua Sin Gaaz/The Baron, who then created child versions of them. Empress's teammate Secret was able to use her Psychopomp abilities to place their original souls in the child bodies, and Empress found herself looking after them. Empress and her kid parents later appeared in the Supergirl (2005) storyline Way of the World.
  Supergirl: Your parents... are WHAT?!?
  Empress: It's a long story. But all you need to know is that they were brought back to life.
  Supergirl: But as kids...?!?

Comic Strips

• When Maria finally reveals she's Samantha and Dave's Kid from the Future in Safe Havens, she's currently in her sixties while the parents are in their thirties. (And during plenty of other times they've interacted they've been the same age.) This also applies with regard to Maria's son, and therefore their grandson, Leonardo da Vinci, as Leo's the same age as their friends' kids, and older than the present day version of his mother, who was only born a couple years ago. Time Travel's weird like that.

Fan Works

• The Neon Genesis Evangelion web comic fanfic Aki-chan's Life (a slice of life/ illustrated epilogue to another, very well written, fanfic called The Second Try) has a somewhat... complicated example. Aki, the daughter of Asuka and Shinji, conceived after the Third Impact, was born when her parents were about 16 or so. Pretty young to begin with. Four years pass, then everyone was swept back in time and her parents returned to the age they were in the anime (14) while she remained unchanged (she's a very precocious 4). They still remain loving, mature parents, but the situation is naturally rather awkward.
• In Ashikabi of Thunder and Lightning, while several Sekirei are siblings or cousins genetically, Yume and Musubi's genetic relationship is best compared to a mother and her daughter, respectively. Takami has no idea how this is possible since the former was a frozen embryo and the latter an egg when the ship was found. She drank herself unconscious when she found this out and makes her desire more just by thinking about it, and it's likely why Yume could transplant her Tama into Musubi. Her best guess is that either the Sekirei are clones of ones that already existed, or were somehow regressed into a fetal state from an outside force.
• In Ask the Little Heros, a Marvel Comics Character Blog where everyone is Younger and Hipper, Wanda and Vision have twin boys through magic, as in canon. The difference is, Wanda did this (accidentally) when she was 9 1/2. A later post says that Billy and Tommy alternate between Xavier's School and foster homes.
  Erik: I let you date the robot for this specific reason and it still happens.
• Child of the Storm:
  • Thor and Loki both look like they're in their late-twenties, have looked that way for the last thousand or years, and probably will for the next thousand or so years. Harry, Thor's son (he was incarnated as James Potter. It Makes Sense in Context), starts the story at thirteen and is growing up fast, to the point where, with skunk stripe, he can pass for 18 in the sequel.
  • It turns out that Steve had an apparently posthumous daughter with Peggy, who was only barely pregnant when the Valkyrie went down (literally the only person who knew was Doctor Strange, resident time-travelling Seer). This resulted in grandchildren and great-grandchildren, one of whom is in her early 20s. Since Steve is physically and mentally in his twenties, he unsurprisingly finds this rather difficult to adjust to when he finds out. But adjust he does, particularly where Carol is concerned.
• Conversations with a Cryptid: All for One is 200 years old, but since he has a longevity quirk, he looks like he's in his mid-20s (grotesque maiming aside). He most certainly doesn't look old enough to be Izuku's father, but he is (even he was surprised, though it was more because he thought he was too old to have kids).
• A Crown of Stars: During the first chapters, Shinji and Asuka find their counterparts of several alternate universes... and the daughter of one of their alternate selves, Misato Ikari. They are nineteen, she is over fifty, and she has children older than them.
• In Batman fanfic Dance with the Demons, Catwoman meets up with Helena Wayne, her daughter from a parallel reality who looks about ten years younger than Selina.
• A popular Fanon idea in the Danny Phantom community is that Danny will start to consider his Opposite-Sex Clone Dani to be his daughter rather than a younger sister, leading to this trope. As a bonus, some fans hypothesize that Dani is actually the result of Vlad splicing Danny's DNA with the DNA of a female his age (usually Sam), making her literally his daughter and promoting the "mother" to this trope as well (there's little consensus on whether Vlad would do this on purpose or not but it usually doesn't matter because the story is epic anyway).
• Basically features in the Doctor Who fic “Fear and Freedom” when the Sixth Doctor ends up in a prison camp with his granddaughter Susan while his first incarnation is trying to deal with the current political crisis outside the camp. At one point, the Sixth Doctor claims that Susan is his daughter rather than his granddaughter, anticipating that no human would believe that a man of his apparent age could have a teenager granddaughter.
• Ghosts of Evangelion: The main characters' parents are slightly older than their children because they spent decades in Instrumentality. Misato and her father are roughly the same age, Asuka and her mother are in their late twenties, and Gendo is only ten years older than Shinji.
• Higher Learning: Kaoru is in his twenties. Shinji and Asuka are his grandparents and they are sixteen. Time Travel is involved.
• House of Summers: Because of time-travelling shenanigans, Rachel Summers looks about the same age than her mother Jean Grey during the first arc.
• In Kim Possible: Mirror, Mirror, Shego is revealed to be the identical daughter of the "original" Shego. The first Shego was kept in stasis for over fifteen years. Due to Drakken tinkering with her as a baby, Shego aged into teen. Now, Shego is older than her biological mother.
• Another Eva fic, Nobody Dies, has two examples: the Reego and the Keiworu. The Reego are virtual constructs made by Iruel for Rei's Lotus-Eater Machine, as theoretical offspring of her and Evangelion Unit 05 (yeah, Iruel was squicked too). Unit 05 "saved" them from deletion when Iruel was defeated and now they exist as AI's in the real world (technically, they've been revealed as Iruelim-class Angelic lifeforms), and consider the 16-year-old Rei and the... much younger Unit 05 to be their parents. The Keiworu are AI copies of Kei Ayanami's mind randomized with elements of Kaworu's mind (both of them being 16), and also consider the two to be their parents.
• In Not Normal Harry's mother, not trusting Dumbledore, set up a complicated spell intended to swap her, James and Harry with transfigured pig corpses as soon as a potentially-lethal spell hit them, leaving them in blood-sealed medical stasis afterwards. For unknown reasons this only worked on the adults, leaving a fourteen-year-old Harry to encounter his still-in-stasis twenty-year-old parents.
• Offspring is a The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild fanfic that kicks off just like in canon, with Link waking up from his century-long stasis. However in this fic, when he visits Zora's Domain Link finds out that he's a father. Prior to Calamity Ganon, Link had married Mipha and had Half Human Hybrid triplets with her. Link and Mipha were forced to leave them when they were four months old (the equivalent of four years for a human). Due to how Zora age, Link's kids are still around after a century. Unfortunately Link is only barely physically older than they are. They're the Zora equivalents of teenagers and he's also physically in his late teens.
• In Paragon (Kim Possible), Ron finds it odd how 18-year old Josh's mother doesn't even look 26. As it turns out, Ron can see dead people.
• The Return, Sunshine comes across as one of these to Muggles due to the complicated nature of Succubae relationships (in purely chronological terms she could actually be younger than 2 of her kids).
• Takami in Sekirei? Is that some new species of little sister? could almost pass for her daughter's twin due to Naruto deciding to de-age her back to eighteen on a whim.
• Us and Them: In this Final Fantasy VII Alternate Universe, Vincent is Sephiroth's father, but due to the experiments Prof. Hojo performed on him, Vincent looks to be almost the exact same age.
• Where We Don't Belong: Mio slowly gets hints that Nia is her mother (and Rex her father), but due to time travel she's actually slightly older than them right now (specifically, her body is physically about 20 years old while Rex is 15 and Nia isn't much older than that).

Film — Animated

• In Coco, people in the afterlife look the age that they died, which can sometimes lead to this. For example, at the end, we see 100-year-old Coco reunited with her 70-something mother and 20-something father.
• Mavis Dracula becomes this in Hotel Transylvania 2 — she and Johnny have a son named Dennis, but Mavis looks more like his sister than his mom. This is because Mavis is a full-blooded vampire and she doesn't age as quickly as humans do. His father Johnny, who is a normal human, doesn't have this excuse.
• In Meet the Robinsons, time-travel allows Wilbur to meet his father Lewis/Cornelius while he's a year older than him.
• In Turning Red, Mei's mother is temporarily deaged to a teenager in the astral realm leading to the appearance of this when Mei comes across her there.

Film — Live-Action

• The Age of Adaline: Adaline never grows old, but those around her, including her daughter, age, making it a very lonely existence. She is shown interacting with her daughter who is elderly while Adaline remains youthful.
• Aliens: Ellen Ripley is supposed to be in her 30s, but when she wakes up after an extended 57 year-long cryo-sleep, she receives news that her daughter Amanda has died a few years prior at the age of 66 (they used a photo of Sigourney Weaver's real-life mother to portray the elder Amanda).
• Blade: In the climax, Blade meets his mother Vanessa for the first time, who was turned into a vampire by Frost. As a result, she looks the same way she did the day that Blade was born, while Blade aged normally as a dhampyr.
• Byzantium: Clara looks more like Eleanor's sister than her mother, due to both being vampires who stopped aging. However, she was already young when she gave birth to Eleanor as a human (around twenty or so). Their actresses are eight years apart.
• Interstellar: After travelling in the vicinity of the black hole Gargantua and being subjected to its Time Dilation effects, Cooper visits his daughter Murph on her deathbed decades later (from her perspective) when she's already an elderly woman and he's still a middle-aged man.
• The 2011 sci-fi thriller In Time:
  • The premise of the film is that humanity has discovered the technology to freeze everyone's age at 25 and now live on internal "time-clocks" which expire after a set period, and people who don't work or don't buy units of time die. The extremely wealthy can purchase enough units of time to indefinitely remain the same age for years (or even decades) - in the film's trailer, a man introduces his wife, daughter and mother-in-law, all of whom are the exact same age.
  • This also sets up a little mini-twist in the trailer. A young woman is angry at a young man for coming home late, and demands to know where he was spending his time. He pulls out a bouquet of flowers and proclaims "Happy eightieth, Mom!"
• Little Nicky: Nicky's mother Holly, who looks younger than Nicky himself. Justified in that angels don't grow old.
• The Lord of the Rings has Arwen (Liv Tyler, b. 1977) looking only slightly younger than her grandmother Galadriel (Cate Blanchett, b. 1969). Elves don't age the way humans do; in universe they're both thousands of years old.
• Mortal Kombat: Annihilation: Queen Sindel looks pretty much the same age as her daughter Kitana. In the games, her race the Edenians are established to have longer-than-human lifespans, so Sindel is Really 700 Years Old.
• Seventh Son (2015): Bony Lizzie looks to be about the same age as her daughter Alice (the actresses are only seven years apart). Probably she remains physically young due to magic, as she's a witch.
• Thanks to being born as part of a Stable Time Loop, John Connor of the Terminator series is around 15 years older than his biological father, Kyle Reese.
• In The Touch of Satan it turns out that the young woman Melissa is actually a 127 year old witch, as a result of selling her soul to save her sister. Said sister is also 127 but looks it. The two live with Luther and Molly, two walnut farmers who pose as Melissa's parents and look at least twice her age, and are presumably actually descendants of one of the sisters. Maybe; it's never made explicit what their true relationship is.
  Paul Chaplin: The people who are apparently her parents? It's unclear who they are. It's never really explained. They may just be walnut farmers who happen to own a witch.

Literature

• In Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor, Celica looks to be around the same age as her son Glenn (who's a young man), due to being The Ageless. Granted, she adopted him, but she looks the same age now as she did when she adopted him.
• Baccano!: Due to being the fully human child of an immortal parent, Chane Laforet is more often assumed to be Huey Laforet's sister or lover than his daughter.
• The Amir Kabal in Brandon Mull's The Beyonders have a peculiar form of looped immortality. When an Amir Kabal dies, his body is regrown with all memories intact from the "seed", a small cyst-like growth at the back of the head, which detaches on death and must be planted in the ground to regrow. The First Death locks the Amir Kabal's current physical state as the template for all future regrowths, so most Amir Kabal deliberately kill themselves around twenty-five or so. This can easily result in a father and/or mother being the same biological age as their child, or sometimes even younger.
• In the Codex Alera series, watercrafters often, in addition to being able to sense emotions and act as medics, seem to age slower, so that some that die of old age in their 80s or 90s look no older than someone in their late 30s or 40s. Most of the watercrafters we see aren't parents, but there are a couple. Lord and Lady Antillus, Crassus and Maximus's parents, are prominent examples. Isana is revealed as Tavi's mother and starts the series approaching 40 and by the end is still described as looking like a girl of 20 aside from her grey hair. Gaius ends up being an Absurdly Youthful grandfather. He's well over 80 by the time the series starts, but outwardly appears to be a man in his 40s.
• In the Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures novels, the Eighth Doctor at one point mentions being a grandfather — he appears to be in his mid-thirties at the time. His companion Fitz, who doesn't know about regeneration, is a bit confused. He later adopts a young girl named Miranda, who ages rather normally, so he looks about forty (and claims to be thirty-six) when she's sixteen, which other characters see as slightly unusual. But after she leaves to have her own life and they're later reunited, several decades have passed since the last time they met, so she actually looks older than he does.
• In Everworld, Goewynne, an elf, is described as looking just as young as her Half-Human Hybrid daughter Etain.
• Star in Glory Road turns out to be this when it's revealed that her "elderly manservant" Rufo is actually her great-grandson. Both have had a life-extension treatment that grants near immortality and allows the recipient to choose how old they're going to look for the rest of their really long lives. She wanted to be young and supernaturally attractive, he wanted be an elderly curmudgeon.
• InCryptid:
  • Alice Price-Healy was born in 1938, but has spent so much time in other dimensions where time flows differently that she looks the same age as her own granddaughters.
  • Martin Baker is a Revenant Zombie who died and was revived at age 23 (though some parts of him may be from older people). He's married to Angela Baker, a Johrlac, who have lifespans in excess of human ones and age much more slowly. They adopted three children, in 1965, 1983, and 1999. It's unknown how old Angela is, but Martin was chronologically 60 when they adopted Sarah, the youngest.
• In The Life & Adventures of Santa Claus and its adaptations, Claus is a mortal raised by a wood nymph named Necile; by the end of the book he appears old while she still looks young, though he then gains immortality himself.
• The Lost Stars, a spinoff of The Lost Fleet, features a pair of military officers in their late twenties/early thirties who are in a vicious professional rivalry, but the male one is also incredibly protective of the female one despite her contempt for him. Many people assume they're in some kind of Slap-Slap-Kiss sexual relationship, but he insists that they are not and seems genuinely disgusted by the idea, despite her being immensely attractive. The truth is eventually revealed: she's his biological mother, despite being seemingly a year younger than him. When she was 19, she volunteered for an assassination mission which involved being frozen and placed in a capsule which was then launched at her target at sublight speeds, taking decades to reach it. A medical exam beforehand revealed she was pregnant, which would have disqualified her; and so the doctor, the male officer's birth/legal mother, removed the fetus and implanted it in herself. She then gave birth to him and presented him as her son. By the time he was old enough to join the military, his biological mother had returned, physically the same age she was when she left.
• Zigzagged with the Oblivion family from the Nightside series. The Oblivion parents left their young son Hadleigh behind when they got dumped into a Timeslip by one of their enemies. Emerging decades later, they discovered that Hadleigh now looked older than them. They've since had two more sons and grown old together. Presently, they look like they could be Hadleigh's parents, because their eldest boy joined the mystical Deep School, becoming so powerful that he no longer seems to age. Eventually he'll wind up looking younger than his littlest brother Tommy ... but not middle brother Larry, because he got turned into a sentient zombie and stopped aging also.
• In the final book of the Percy Jackson series, Kronos is possessing the body of a teenager, while the gods' appearance is usually based on however mortals think of them. This leads to him appearing about the same age as the demigods he's fighting, despite being their grandfather or even great-grandfather, and younger than those of his (godly) children who are present, which gets Lampshadeed.
  Hades: Hello, Father. You're looking young.
• In Rain of the Ghosts, the title character's 80-something grandfather dies, then comes back as a ghost that looks like a young man. Rain doesn't even recognize him at first, and later notes how weird it is that her beloved Papa Bastian is now about ten years older her.
• In the Sholan Alliance, Rezac and Zashou had a son around the time of the Cataclysm. To protect him, Kaid is put through a time portal, so a thousand years later, he has grown into an adult. His parents spent the intervening time on The Slow Path in suspended animation, so when they are awoken, they are younger than their son. It gets worse when Kaid realises that his son, Dzaka, is also older than they are.
• In the Sword of Truth series, it is mentioned that Verna used to have a daughter who died of old age decades ago. Verna lived in a Wizarding School under a spell that slows aging, and if a wizard or a sorceress there had a Muggle Born of Mages, he or she was given up for adoption.
• In Team Human, Kit is a human who was raised by vampires, and Mel notes that his "Mom" looks too young to have a teenage son. Kit turns out to have been a Doorstop Baby, though at first Mel is unsure if she might be his birth mother who "transitioned" later.
• Tinker: Tinker's biological mother, Esme Shenske, was, along with everyone else who was on one of the colony ships going through the hyperphase gate, effectively in stasis for a period of time ranging from a few months to decades. By the time she, and everyone else, are released, she's still in her late twenties and doesn't look old enough to have an eighteen-year-old daughter.
• At one point in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Maureen mentions her 150th birthday. Her son, Lazarus, is well over 2000 at that point. She was collected from 20th century Earth and brought to another planet, skipping a couple of millennia of time that Lazarus simply lived through.
• When Apollo becomes mortal in The Trials of Apollo, he's given the body of a teenager, making him the same age as, or younger than, his demigod children, making for some rather awkward interactions.
• A really bizarre case in The Twilight Saga with Bella Swan-Cullen and her daughter Renesmee. She gave birth to her just before her nineteenth birthday, but since she got turned into a vampire at the same time AND her daughter's Immortality Begins at Seventeen eventually they'll look about the same. Carlisle and Esme Cullen are also way too young to have all of those teenage kids, even if they are adopted.

Live-Action TV

• In Angel, the title character's son Connor is kidnapped as an infant and trapped in Another Dimension where time passes much more rapidly, so when he reappears a few months later- from the perspective of the other characters- he is already in his teens. Angel also only looks young; as an immortal vampire, he is Really Three Hundred Years Old.
• Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger: Asuka and Mahoro are both around their early 20s, but due to their infant daughter being used as a host for the soul of the Big Bad, she first appears as a child of around seven and then a young woman in her late teens, while her parents remain the same age.
• Cursed (2020): Merlin doesn't look old enough to be Nimue's father (as the actors are only fifteen years apart-although that has happened). It's revealed however that he hasn't aged for centuries.
• Doctor Who:
  • When we first meet the Doctor, he is an old man played by William Hartnell, and realistically has a teenaged granddaughter played by Carole Ann Ford. For the show's 20th anniversary special Susan returns, but the Doctor is now Peter Davison, so his granddaughter looks significantly older than he is (Ford is eleven years older than Davison).
    • The Susan example is lampshaded in the Big Finish Doctor Who audio "An Earthly Child", where Susan's son Alex can't understand how Susan looks older than her grandfather, now Paul McGann — from Alex's perspective, the Doctor looks like he could be his father.
  • Due to a mixture of time travel, regeneration, and slower ageing, Melody Pond, aka River Song is physically in her 40s in most of her appearances, while her parents are physically in their 20s. Even in an earlier (and younger) regeneration, she's still the same physical age as her parents, and was in fact one of their friends from school as her parents didn't know who she was.
  • Amy and Rory's story ends with them being separated from the Doctor and stuck in early 20th century New York. Decades later, their adopted son delivers a letter to Rory's father. Rory acknowledges how weird it must be for Brian to have a grandson older than he is.
  • In Torchwood: Children of Earth, the immortal Jack's daughter Alice is upset that she looks older than him.
• In The Flash (2014), Nora West-Allen travels back in time to meet her father Barry Allen. Since Barry's current time period is before Nora's birth, Barry and Iris look absurdly young to have an adult daughter. This stands out particularly because Nora is supposed to be in her late 20s, making her only a few years younger than Barry and Iris who are both 30 years old. In real life, Jessica Parker Kennedy (Nora West-Allen) is 5 years older than Grant Gustin (Barry Allen) and 3 years older than Candice Patton (Iris West-Allen).
• In Forever, Henry looks about 40 (i.e. the age of the actor playing him). However, being immortal (both of The Ageless and Resurrective Immortality kinds) means that the son he adopted in the 1940s as a baby (after rescuing him from a Nazi concentration camp) now looks twice his age. They made a decision that Abe would never introduce his girlfriends to Henry because they would eventually realize he wasn't aging; when they finally try to arrange a dinner for Henry to meet Abe's twice-over ex-wife Maureen Delacroix in "The Ecstasy of Agony", Maureen assumes Henry is Abe's son from a past relationship.
• In Fringe, both Olivia Dunham and Peter Bishop wind up as absurdly youthful parents of their now-grown daughter after they are trapped in amber for 21 years.
• In Grimm, Sean Renard and his mother Elizabeth look around the same age. In story, it's because Elizabeth's Hexenbeist nature keeps her human form from aging, suggesting Zauberbiest Sean will eventually stop aging as well. In real life, it's because the actress is actually only three years older than the actor.
• On Haven, there are three examples:
  • Audrey looks to be about the same age as her son James, that she had during her past life as Sarah in 1955. This is because Audrey and Sarah are both the different lives of Mara, some sort of immortal being from another world.
  • Charlotte, Mara's mother, looks the same age as her for much the same reason.
  • Nathan is technically twenty years younger than his own son because he was conceived when Nathan time traveled to the past.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider Amazons: Chihiro is born at some point during the five-year Time Skip between the two seasons. Because of his Amazon genes, his aging is accelerated and he is already 17 years old by the start of S2. This makes him only 13 years younger than his mother, Nanaha, despite having been born when she was in her late 20s.
  • Kamen Rider Den-O:
    • Takeru Sato, the lead actor, left the franchise after the TV series; so for future movies and spin-offs, they de-aged Ryotaro into an 11 or 12-year-old boy, making him younger than his grandson Kotaro who is around 18.
    • Due to the characters being taken from different points in their timelines, 19-year-old Yuto Sakurai is around the same age as his daughter, Hana. Hana's mother, Airi, is in her late 20s and thus only a decade or so older than Hana.
  • Kamen Rider Kiva:
    • Thanks to time travel, father and son Otoya and Wataru meet when they are 23 and 18 years old respectively. In the finale, Wataru meets his own teenage son from the future.
    • Wataru and Taiga's mother Maya who, being a Fangire, doesn't age at the same rate as a human and looks around 20 years old; appearing younger than Taiga, who is in his mid-to-late 20s.
  • Kamen Rider Geats: Daichi Isuzu creates the Queen Jyamato Hazuki, whom he treats as his daughter despite her appearing the same age. She then has a son, who (due to being a Half-Human Hybrid) rapidly ages up in a short space of time. This gives Daichi, who's in his mid-late 20s, an adult daughter and around 10-year-old grandson.
• In Lost Girl, Bo is 28 years old in the first season, while her mother looks like she's in her late thirties (she is actually Fae and hundreds of years old). Anna Silk, who plays Bo, is actually four years older than the actress playing her mother.
• New Amsterdam (2008): The main character is 400 years old but looks 35 (the age at which he became immortal via magical means); he sometimes seeks advice from one of his still-living sons, who is a naturally-aging 65-year-old.
• The New Avengers: In "K is for Kill", Colonel Stanislav activates a cadre of Soviet soldiers who were put into cryogenic sleep shortly after World War II. One of the soldiers is his father, who now appears about half the age of his son.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • Three generations of women, Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison), her mother Snow White/Mary Margaret (Ginnifer Goodwin), and Snow's stepmother Regina (Lana Parrilla), are all played by actresses within five years of each other. However, Mary Margaret's and Regina's aging were frozen by the curse (it's complicated), and Regina is certainly implied to be closer in age to Snow White than her actual mother was.
  • Lampshaded at the beginning of series two by Henry calling Charming "Grandpa" for the first time - Henry is ten years old while Charming is in his early thirties at the most.
  • Rumplestiltskin's father Peter Pan, who looks young enough to be Rumple's grandson. Pan gained eternal youth in Neverland, while Rumple aged normally until he became the Dark One.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Vanishing Act", a man finds himself unstuck in time when Starfish Aliens with no concept of time use him as a host to explore the Earth, only to transport him 10 years into the future every time they return him to his planet. He fathers a son in 1959 when he's physically 25, and the last time they meet in 1989, his son is already 3-4 years older than him.
• In Red Dwarf, Kochanski is roughly the same age as her son (or, if you go by the actors' ages, slightly younger). She conceives him after meeting him as an adult, and the baby is taken back in time by his adult self. Her son is Lister, who is also his own father.
• In Rentaghost, ghosts manifest as they age they were when they died. So Hubert Davenport's mother, who died in her twenties, looks much younger than her son, who died when he was much older (his late fifties or early sixties).
• Resurrection:
  • Barbara looks about the same age as her daughter, since she didn't age all those years that she was dead. It can work in reverse too—Henry and Lucille look like they should be grandparents, but their resurrected son Jacob is still only eight.
  • In season two, Henry and Fred's mother Margaret comes back. It's mentioned that she was 54 when she died; it's not clear how old either brother is supposed to be in-universe, but both actors are older than Margaret's actress, and they mention how odd it is that she can still "parent" them despite them being older.
• Second Chance (2016) revolves around a 75-year old man who is brought Back from the Dead and de-aged by an experimental treatment to his 35-year old self. This results in him actually being younger than his own son, a 40-something single father of a teenage girl.
• In The Second Hundred Years, Luke Carpenter was a prospector buried in a glacial avalanche in Alaska in 1900 and turned into a Human Popsicle. When he was thawed out in 1967, he had a 67 year old son and a 33 year old Identical Grandson (played by the same actor who played Luke).
• In Sleepy Hollow, Henry Parrish aka Jeremy Crane looks decades older than his parents, thanks to his father having been technically dead for the last two hundred years, while his mother was trapped in purgatory, so neither have aged. There's also weird stuff with actual ages going on, since both Henry and his mother are witches while his father is human, so as well as looking older Henry is physically two hundred years old than his father.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "Redemption", we are introduced to the half-Romulan Sela (born 2345), daughter of the human Tasha Yar (born 2337). The way this happened is that in an alternate timeline episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" Tasha Yar time traveled back with Enterprise C to the point where history had changed. The return of Enterprise C had restored the timeline, but Tasha remained part of the past.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In the episode "The Visitor", Captain Benjamin Sisko becomes de-synced from normal time following an engineering accident. As time passes normally for his son Jake, whenever Ben reappears for a brief time in normal space, he is the same age as he was during the accident. Eventually, Jake ends up older than his father.
• Supernatural:
  • Downplayed when Mary Winchester is permanently brought Back from the Dead in season 12; there's still a small age difference between herself and her two sons, but since she'd been dead for many years while they aged normally, no more than a decade or so.
  • Henry Winchester, Sam and Dean's paternal grandfather, travels forward in time from 1958 to 2013.
  • When Jack temporarily dies, he visits his mother in Heaven. The age differential is exaggerated because she's reliving one of her childhood memories at the time; it's only when the young man approaching informs the little girl that he's her son that she changes back to her adult self. Also, because of his inhuman nature, Jack himself aged to adulthood pretty much overnight after he was born, so even when they're both their "correct" ages, it's still unusually marginal.
  • The goddess Fortuna looks like a forty-year old woman, but her Semi-Divine son seems to be in his mid-thirties.
• The Twilight Zone:
  • The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Queen of the Nile", it turns out that the elderly woman Viola Draper is actually the daughter of the younger-looking Pamela Morris, an immortal witch who maintains her youth by draining the life out of men.
  • The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Father & Son Game", the 79-year-old Darius Stephens' consciousness is placed in a Cyborg body resembling a man in his late 30s. As such, he looks more than ten years younger than his 50-year-old son Michael.
• Katherine from The Vampire Diaries had a daughter prior to becoming a vampire (allowing the Petrova bloodline to carry on until today, with Elena being the only remaining descendant of this daughter). And then said daughter, Nadia, shows up in season 5. She got turned into a vampire in her early thirties (at least) to search for Katherine, which she has been doing for five hundred years. Funny thing is, Katherine looks even younger than Nadia!
• In an episode of Warehouse 13, Mrs. Frederick (who looks about 60) introduces Claudia to her grandson, who looks to be in his 80s — meanwhile, she hasn't aged a day since at least the 1940s. This is a harsh lesson that being a Warehouse Caretaker has a negative side (i.e., she will outlive all her friends and loved ones).
• Xena: Warrior Princess: Xena was presumably in her 30s when she had her daughter Eve. Shortly after Eve's birth, she and Gabrielle were frozen in ice for two decades. When she emerges unaged, she doesn't look that much older than the 20-year-old Eve.

Myths & Religion

• In Classical Mythology, Apollo is generally depicted as a beardless youth, but that's not always the case for his children. For example, Asclepius, a mortal son who was eventually deified as a god of health, was a bearded older man.
  • Downplayed with Demeter, the Goddess of the Harvest, and her daughter Persephone, the Goddess of the Underworld — the two were often said to look nearly identical, as opposed to Persephone looking older, and both were often given a youthful visage in artistic depictions.

Theatre

• In the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Iolanthe, the hero Strephon is half-fairy. Fairies are unaging and Strephon has a hard time explaining to his beloved that these nubile women he is seen embracing are, in fact, his mother and his aunts, all of whom look younger than him. One ancillary character opines that if the woman is indeed his mother, she must have given birth at age minus seven.
  I wouldn't say a word that could be reckoned as injurious
  But to find a mother younger than her son is very curious

Video Games

• Dragalia Lost: Nedrick presumably died shortly after his birth. Not wanting to lose his son, King Aurelius cloned him. This means that Euden is the same age as Nedrick, who is technically his biological father. This means that Euden’s “father,” King Aurelius, is his grandfather, and his “siblings” are actually his aunts and uncles.
• In Dragon Ball: Fusions, the playable characters hail from different eras and universes from the Dragon Ball timeline. Hence, when the avatar character runs into nine-year-old Gohan, their team is guaranteed to have his fifteen-year-old father, his future little brother who is only two years younger and his future nine-year-old daughter. Gohan becomes swiftly and suitably shocked.
• Dragon Quest V: While the hero and his wife have children at around 16-18 respectively, they are turned into stone the day after the birth, and aren't freed until eight years later by the kids. Which is why they're about ten years apart in appearance.
• While it's technological rather than supernatural, in Fallout 4, after the Player Character's infant son is kidnapped and their spouse killed, s/he is put back into cryogenic stasis for another 60 years. By this time, the now 60 year-old Shaun has become the head of the Institute.
• Fantasy Life has the de-aging variant for King Erik who looks like a young boy but has an at least teenage daughter. It turns out that his rival in magic based prank war did this to him.
• Fire Emblem:
  • The Kid from the Future variant occurs in Fire Emblem: Awakening. In fact, one occurs for each pair of units that reaches S-rank. If the Avatar marries one of those kids, the parents become Supernaturally Young Grandparents.
  • Fire Emblem Fates has the magic-aging variant. In this case the children are born in real time, but are sent to another realm where time moves faster than in the real world. In this case they are sent away due to the incredible danger posed by the current war going on, and wish to keep them safe. However, several of the children have issues with their parents due to the dissonance of how they perceive this time to have passed (because to them it felt like they were gone for years at a time), and their supports tend to deal with the gaps between them that arose as a result. It gets positively weird though when you can have characters like Sakura and Elise (who are late teenage girls at most), be the parents of kids that are older than them. In fact, it's specifically noted that Rhajat is now older than her father Hayato. In the case of three of the children from Awakening (Owain, Inigo, and Severa who in Fates go by the names Odin, Laslow, and Selena respectively), they can also be parents in Fates making Lissa, Olivia, and Cordelia supernaturally young grandmothers. It gets even better, though. The Avatar is able to marry any of their children and have his/her own child, Kana, by them, meaning it's very possible for Lissa, Olivia, and Cordelia to be supernaturally young great-grandmothers.
  • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Seteth and Flayn are actually father and daughter, but pose as brother and sister due to the former appearing much younger than he should and their species aging extremely slowly (if not stopping altogether).
• Galaxy Angel: Shatoyarn is over 600 years old, but has stayed as a beautiful young woman thanks to an advanced cloning process to stay alive. Prior to the first game, she also gave birth to Shiva.
• Golden Sun:
  • The playable characters, along with Alex and Kraden, were all exposed to age-slowing amounts of Alchemy at the end of The Lost Age. So thirty years later, in Dark Dawn, the former player characters all appear to be in their mid-to-late twenties, with teenage or young adult children. Alex was exposed to more of Alchemy's power than anybody else and is basically immortal: The only reason he looks older than his child at all is because the kid in question doesn't look nineteen.
  • Karis complains about the ramifications of this trope... which makes sense when you remember that her father, Ivan, was the youngest of the original protagonists, and probably doesn't look much older than Karis herself now (and probably far younger than her mother).
• Due to Gears maturing far faster than humans, Dizzy from Guilty Gear was a mother before she turned 5. She and her son also look fairly close in age due to her having spent several years in temporal suspension.
• Half of Lost Odyssey's playable cast are immortals who have lived at least centuries and are perfectly capable of having children. This results in situations like Kaim and Sarah looking more like Cooke and Mack's parents than grandparents or Cool Old Guy Sed referring to a woman who appears a third his age as "Mama".
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Sindel looks less like Kitana's mother and more like her sister, thanks to Edenians having lifespan measuring centuries.^note It should be noted that in the original and rebooted continuities, Sindel died when Kitana was still a child, and was resurrected when she was already an adult. In the New Era, however, Sindel is around to watch Kitana (and Mileena) grow up, and looks as young as ever.
  • Mortal Kombat 11 brings characters from the beginning of the series to several decades into the future, causing confusion and discomfort. This is especially uncomfortable for Cassie Cage, who is still mourning her recently-deceased mother, when she meets her mother's past self who's barely older than she is.
• Skullgirls has Lorenzo Medici who, in the mobile prequel version of the game, looked significantly younger than his son Vitale, due to Lorenzo’s possession of the Life Gem. Once Ms. Fortune swallowed the Gem, though, he went into hiding due to the years catching up to him as seen in Peacock’s ending in the main game.
• The Kid from the Future version also happens at the beginning and end of Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers with Roger Wilco and Roger Wilco Jr. This also creates a Stable Time Loop, as Roger Jr. shows his father a holo of his mother, thus compelling Roger Sr. to go after Beatrice when he finally meets her for real.
• Tales Series:
  • In Tales of Destiny 2, Kyle is the son of Stahn and Rutee from Tales of Destiny. The second game is set 18 years after first game, and all returning characters, naturally, aged. However, in various crossovers Stahn and Rutee appears as their ToD selves, when they were in their late teens, alongside their 15-years old son. In various Tales of the World games, Kyle is usually straight-up a Kid from the Future, but in Tales Of The Rays he and his parents was copied in the world of the game from different points in time. The same applies to Lilith and Rimul, who also were reunited in Rays as teens.
  • From Tales of Symphonia, Kratos has been physically been around 28 for 4,000 years, which helps him hide the fact that he is Lloyd's father from the child, or else it would have appeared that he had fathered him at the age of 11.
• Nina Williams from the Tekken series is 22 years old, and thanks to a 19-year-long cryogenic sleep, is only 2 years older than her son, 20-year-old Steve Fox.
• In Touhou Project, Sanae Kochiya is a distant descendant of the goddess Suwako Moriya. Suwako actually looks much younger than Sanae, though since she's a goddess who's been around for a long time it's likely that she didn't always appear to be so young.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has a variation of this with the Vandham family. It is revealed that the short-lived Kevesi and Agnian soldiers can have children who are born with normal lifespans due to not being part of Aionios' cycle, and the Vandhams are distant descendants of past incarnations of Noah and Mio, who went on to become immortal Moebius N and M. Kevesi and Agnians are incapable of reaching a physical age past twenty, so N and M are permanently stuck at that age. A more straightforward example happens in the prequel expansion Future Redeemed, which involves N and M's son Ghondor (who is an old man) and great-grandchildren Matthew and Na'el (who look about the same age as their great-grandfater). Add the current Noah and Mio to the mix, who as soldiers are physically in their late teens and thus younger than Guernica and Monica...

Visual Novels

• Tsugumi in Ever17 doesn't look much older than her sixteen-year-old children, as she stopped aging at seventeen. You's mother is a more conventional really-young-looking parent... because her "daughter" is really a clone of herself that she had made when she was diagnosed with a terminal illness in her teens, and You'haru stopped aging too, at the age of twenty.
• In Higurashi: When They Cry, it's revealed in the TIPS/Rei OVA that Hanyuu, who looks about anywhere from 8-12, in fact had a daughter way back when. She was actually an adult when she had her child in life but appears as a young girl in order to get Rika to better relate with her.
• Zero Escape being a franchise about Mental Time Travel, you'd expect this to be one thing that isn't possible. However, the third game has Diana (old enough to be already divorced once, but doesn't seem to be much older than her late 20s) and Sigma (physically 22, mentally 67) be the parents of 20-year-old Phi and 124-year-old Delta (as well as another Phi, who is implied to have raised her younger version and would also be 124 years old if she was still alive). Without Diana even having given birth to them yet. It's time travel, of course things are gonna get weird.

Webcomics

• In Brat-Halla, Loki is a child while his daughter, Hel, is an adult teacher. The explanation is that he accidentally ate a whole pie made from Idunn's apples of immortality and de-aged as a result.
• You might not suspect it, but Drowtales' Queen Diva is a great-great-great (times x) grandma and well over 1000 years old by the time the story starts, which isn't unusual since fae (dark elves, drow, drowussu, etc.) stop aging at the human equivalent of 30 years old, so parents often end up looking the same age as their children and vice-versa. Additionally, Diva's Fusion Dance, Ragini/Liriel, makes her look about 12 once she fully manifests, which leads to a hilariously awkward moment where Diva meets two of her grandchildren and looks the same age as her granddaughter, to the point that Chrys'tel's clothes (from 22 chapters earlier) fit her perfectly.
• Eerie Cuties:
  • Maria Delacroix and her husband, Eugene, don't look a day older than their late 20s, despite being over two centuries old. She's even raised 13 children, yet you'd never know it from looking at her. Justified since they're both vampires, who're capable of having children, like humans can.
  • Then we meet Adora Love, though Chloe's mom said herself that an adult succubus have free choice as to her body's age.
• It's not directly addressed by the narritive, but Kirsty from Ennui GO! was less than 10 years old by the time of her daughter's birth due to being a clone who was Born as an Adult (her nephew Max was already in school when she was created and had entered his first year of high school by the time of his cousin's birth).
• In Homestuck, in every session of Sburb, it is predestined that the players will almost^note Exception: Caliborn and arguably Calliope all really be paradox clones created by one of the players during that session. While this process isn't explicitly shown in the Trolls' session (though the end result is), in the kids' session, we see that John first created Nanna Egbert, Grandpa Harley, Bro Strider, and Mom Lalonde and then created the children themselves by combining this quartet pairwise, thereby making them essentially just a few minutes younger than their biological parents, whom in most cases were also their acting parents due to having been sent to different points in time. John, however, is quite a bit older than his "father", who is actually his half-brother. On top of that, if you consider creating the paradox clones to be a form of parenthood, this means that John is, at age 13, either a father of eight or a father of four and a grandfather of four, or both, depending on your perspective as to whether the second generation should be considered children as well or grandchildren. In short: Stable Time Loops and genetics should never mix.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: Solomon David's advisory council is composed of his children, who all look considerably older than him. He doesn't give the impression that Outliving One's Offspring bothers him.
  Solomon David: Twenty-five generations of my sons have withered and died before me. I do not expect any of you will achieve much else.
• Mom, I'm Sorry: 22-year-old Henry gives 30 years of his life (plus 14 years of fees) to his dying mother, which de-ages her to 20. He would have aged if he was going to die naturally, exacerbating the age disparity, but the fact that he stays the same age indicates that he will die in an accident.
• In The Order of the Stick, when Roy meets his mother in the afterlife, he doesn't recognize her because she's younger than he is. Sara explains that people exist as their idealized selves, and she never quite stopped thinking of herself as a young woman. When Roy points out that his father Eugene still looks old, Sara (who had a bad relationship with him) notes that he was always a crotchety old man, even when he was young.
• In Ozy and Millie, the Dread Pirate Locke ages in reverse, making him about the same age as his daughter Millie.
• In Sailor Sun, 20 year old Bay Smith alternatively plays mother to two versions of her daughter Brady Honey Smith that were snatched from alternate futures: 18 year old Honey and kindergartner/preschooler Brady.
• Vampire Cheerleaders: Applies to both Stephanie and Charlotte by the comic's final volume, where they've both become parents:
  • Stephanie became the newly appointed Moth Queen, which greatly extended her natural lifespan and prevents her from aging. Which allowed her to help the Mothmen replenish their Dying Race by breeding with them and bearing dozens upon dozens of their offspring.
  • In Charlotte's case, it was due to Stephanie using her powers as Moth Queen to permanently lock her age at 32. Thereby greatly extending her lifespan as well, much like her husband's and their son, who're both Dhampyrs.

Western Animation

• DC Animated Universe:
  • Batman: The Animated Series: Ra's Al Ghul is immortal through the use of Lazarus Pits. One episode reveals that he had a son during the old west who is still alive today and looks appropriately ancient, whereas Ra's himself looks closer to late middleaged.
  • Justice League: Morgaine Le Fey granted herself and her son immortal youth, leaving Mordred an eternal Bratty Half-Pint. When he is tricked into magically aging himself up, he breaks the eternal youth part and gets stuck with eternal life. The last shot of the episode is Morgaine, who wears a face-concealing mask but appears no older than her 30s, attending to her son, who now appears to be in his 80s or older and has gone senile.
• Disenchantment: Dagmar was turned into a statue for 15 years and didn't age during that time. When her daughter Bean revives her, their apparent age difference is about a decade.
• A variant in Futurama, Professor Farnsworth is a distant descendant of Fry's older brother, making him Fry's many-times-grandnephew. Their familial relationship rarely comes up, but when it does they refer to each other as "uncle" and "nephew", despite Fry being (physically) young enough to be the elderly professor's grandson.
• On Gargoyles, Goliath and Demona both look too young to be Angela's parents due to a bizarre combination of magical circumstances: he was Taken for Granite and she gained Immortality from a Deal With The Fair Folk. As a bonus, Angela was raised on an island where one hour passes for a day in the normal world, so really, all of them should have died centuries ago.
• One episode of Jackie Chan Adventures involves the series Deuteragonist, Jade Chan, going back in time to when her Uncle Jackie was around her age. Another episode does it the other way, with an adult Jade travelling from the future to the present to prevent a Bad Future.
• In Mary Shelley's Frankenhole, Frankenstein and Elizabeth's two sons, Heinrich and Gustav, are doddering, senile old men while Victor and Elizabeth, due to an immortality potion, are still physically young adults.
• In Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Eclipsa was trapped in a crystal for 300 years, during which she did not age. Her daughter Meteora (aka Miss Heinous) managed to magically live that long herself, but still looks like an old woman. Later subverted when Meteora is turned back into a baby, presumably losing all of her adult memories (though it is hinted that she retains a least a little bit of her memories from her past “life,” as she still hates Marco).
• Wakfu: Sadlygrove eventually discovers he's an amnesiac God in Human Form. Goultard, who looks older and became his mentor, is actually his son. Eventually, this causes Sadlygrove to get an intense worry that he has a bunch of other neglected children from his past life.
• In Young Justice (2010), Bart travels back in time to the same day that his grandmother, Iris, found out that she was pregnant. (She hadn't even had a chance to tell Barry yet.) He's also stuck there, so the season three episode "Home Fires" confirms that he's around to babysit his toddler father (and aunt).
  Bart: [waves at Iris' abdomen] Hi, Dad! Hi, Aunt Dawn!
  Barry: Wait — there are two in there?!
  Iris: We're having twins?!
  Bart: Oops! Spoilers...
  • The episode "Evolution" sees the immortal Vandal Savage interacting with two of his daughters: Cassandra, who is a young adult, and Olympia, a senile old woman who could probably pass as his mother. Of course, the episode reveals that he's outlived countless children over the millennia.

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