Basic Trope: Someone looks younger than they really are.
- Straight: Alice is seventeen years old, but is often mistaken for a fourteen-year-old.
- Exaggerated:
- Really 700 Years Old.
- Alice looks like a five-year-old, but is in fact older than the universe itself.
- Downplayed:
- Characters assume Alice is 12, but she's really 15.
- Alice is 40 years old, but due to maintaining a healthy life, she looks a couple of years younger.
- Justified:
- Alice was put under a curse that makes her look young forever (or made a Deal with the Devil to look young forever, a la The Picture of Dorian Gray)
- Alice is a member of a secret clan of immortals who either don't age or age once every 100 years.
- Alice actually lives a clean life (no smoking, no drinking, no drugs, no wild, promiscuous sex) and takes care of herself (eats right and exercises).
- Emotional Maturity Is Physical Maturity.
- Alice has access to the finest plastic surgery around.
- Alice was preserved through cryogenic stasis.
- Alice is not actually a human, but a member of a species that ages differently than humans.
- Alice has a growth disorder similar to Bart de Graaff
- Alice is a vampire.
- Alice has a "babyface" - that is, her body looks mature, but her face is more fitting on a teenager.
- People develop and grow at different rates than their peers and not all people hit puberty at the same age.
- Alice is a life sized doll, and dolls clearly can't "grow up".
- Alice has Merlin Sickness, and is going to look even younger as time goes on.
- Inverted: Younger Than They Look.
- Subverted: She appears to be in the same class as Bob, as well as Charles and Diane, who are in sixth grade.
- Double Subverted:
- She's repeating grades.
- Alternatively, she's a teacher of this class.
- Parodied:
- Alice even acts the age she looks.
- Alice looks like a toddler, but she is really an elderly, and she even exactly behaves like a stereotypical senior— she yells at teenagers to stay off her lawn, hoards load of cats, hates new technology, and plays games like bingo and gin rummy..
- Zig Zagged: Alice is part of a family of beings who age extremely slowly after reaching adulthood, most of whom are hundreds of years old. However, Alice mentions that she's on the young side compared to the other members in her family. But she never makes it clear exactly how old she is, making it unclear whether she's 25 or 125.
- Averted: Alice looks and acts her age.
- Enforced:
- The creators were trying to avert Dawson Casting, but they overshot and accidentally landed themselves with Underage Casting.
- Alice is Older Than the Demographic, so she's given younger appearances to help her relate with the target audience.
- Lampshaded: "Alice, are you sure you're seventeen?"
- Invoked: Alice dresses to make herself look younger.
- Exploited: Alice takes advantage of her childlike appearance to get away with doing things that would look out-of-place, inappropriate, or embarrassing for teenagers or adults to do.
- Defied: Alice dresses to make herself look older.
- Discussed: "Why on earth do people keep asking me if I have my parent's permission? I don't need it."
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Alice isn't taken seriously by others because of how easy she can pass for someone under 18 years old.
- Alice's boyfriend is arrested for lewd acts with a minor just because of Alice's youthful looks.
- Reconstructed: Alice always carries a legal ID that proves her real age to avoid misunderstandings.
- Played For Laughs: Alice goes to get her drivers license and gets rejected for being too young. Frustrated she goes to an American bar, shows her ID and orders a drink.
- Played For Drama: As a teenager who looks like a child, adults and other teenagers don't take her seriously and dismiss anything she has to say, even if it's important. Anything mature she tries to do is mistaken for Troubling Unchildlike Behavior.
- Played For Horror: Alice is quite happy to learn Bob has a crush on her, until he starts treating her in strange condescending ways. To Alice's shock, Bob turns out to be a pedophile who mistook her for a child.
- Implied: Alice looks like a child, but the other children act and speak formally toward her.
Back to Older Than They Look.
