Basic Trope: A hero is much older than everyone else, but goes up against a villain much younger or in their physical prime.
- Straight: Gerald Good, a superhero, is nearing fifty, while his arch-nemesis Edward Evil is in his twenties.
- Exaggerated: Edward Evil is a five-year-old supervillain, while Gerald Good is nearing a hundred.
- Downplayed: Gerald Good is ten years older than Edward Evil, and can kind of feel the difference in their physical abilities as a result of the age difference, but it doesn't wind up being too much of a problem.
- Justified:
- Gerald Good's first nemesis was Edward Evil's parent, and Edward is merely continuing their fight against him.
- There are less and less heroes that arise with each passing generation, so Gerald Good has to keep fighting villains, including the younger ones like Edward Evil.
- Edward Evil used a Fountain of Youth to look the way he does.
- Edward Evil was Gerald Good's protégé until he went bad.
- Gerald is substituting for Blake Bashful while the latter is in the hospital for appendicitis.
- Gerald has had to learn through experience than it's better to be good than evil whilst Edward Evil is too young and barsh to go through the same learning curve yet.
- Inverted: Edward Evil is much older than his arch-nemesis Gerald Good (Older Villain vs. Younger Hero).
- Subverted:
- Edward Evil is older than he looks, and is actually around Gerald Good's age.
- Gerald Good is younger than he looks, and is actually around Edward Evil's age.
- Double Subverted: Being Older Than They Look/Younger Than They Look turned out to be a fluke somehow, and Gerald Good is still much older than Edward Evil.
- Parodied: All of Gerald Good and Edward Evil's fights devolve into snarking at each other about their age.
- Zig Zagged: Gerald Good starts out twenty years older than Edward Evil, but then gets his youth restored somehow, turning him into Edward Evil's contemporary. Then Edward Evil gets hit with an aging beam, turning him into an old man. Then it's revealed that Gerald Good has been using a glamour all this time, and reverts to his age, and then Edward Evil was actually faking his birth year and is actually Gerald Good's age...
- Averted: Gerald Good and Edward Evil's ages are never mentioned, nor do they affect their battles.
- Enforced:
- "It'll be boring if the hero and his nemesis were the same age, so I'm going to make the villain younger to make it more interesting."
- The best choices for Gerald and Edward just happened to have this age gap and the producers decided to Throw It In!.
- Lampshaded: "Can you really beat him, Gerald? He's way younger than you are!"
- Invoked: "I, Edward Evil, will use this youth serum to return to my mid-twenties so I can better take on that semi-retiree Gerald Good!"
- Exploited: Edward Evil fights Gerald Good in a battle relying on strength, knowing Gerald Good will be at a disadvantage because of his age.
- Defied: Gerald Good knows that his age won't let him fight villains like Edward Evil for much longer, so he becomes The Mentor to Sally Sidekick, who is Edward Evil's age and will take up the fight against him.
- Discussed: "The hero's usually a lot older than the villain in movies, just like Gerald and Edward!"
- Conversed:Alice: Oh, what happened on the latest issue of The Adventures of Gerald Good?
Bob: He's gotta fight a new villain named Edward Evil. He's like twenty.
Alice: Of course he is. - Implied: Gerald Good is the Hero of Another Story, and talks about how he has to fight a bunch of "kids," but we never meet any of his Rogues Gallery.
- Deconstructed: Their age difference means Gerald Good is soundly beaten by Edward Evil in a straight-up fight despite Gerald's best efforts, and he is promptly killed or critically injured.
- Reconstructed: Gerald Good might not be in any physical condition to take on Edward Evil in a straight-up fight, but his wisdom, intelligence, and experience in the field is instrumental in beating Edward Evil. In addition, the younger heroes are heavily influenced by Gerald Good.
- Played For Laughs: Gerald Good is hilariously beat up every time he fights Edward Evil.
- Played For Drama:
- Gerald Good undergoes a personal crisis after being unable to beat Edward Evil, and considers retiring as a superhero.
- Edward Evil, the idiot whippersnapper, does not seems to understand that being a veteran superhero in the Twentieth/early Twenty-First Century means having seen action in one or more terrible conflicts and done a fair share of distasteful deeds and Gerald has a beast very deep down inside that Edward is awakening and it's not going to be pretty when it happens.
Back to Older Hero vs. Younger Villain.
