Basic trope: Extraordinarily ancient character looks much younger than they are.
- Straight: Alice looks like she's in her twenties despite being seven hundred years old.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice is seven hundred years old, but she looks like she's two.
- On the opposite end of the scale, Alice looks like she's twenty, but in reality she's been around for over forty million years.
- She appears to be 30 years old, but is from a world where she had resided in for over seventy quintillion years.
- Downplayed:
- Alice looks twenty at the age of fifty.
- Alice is the oldest member of the cast of major characters, and looks the part. But she looks like a thirty or forty-something surrounded by college students, she's actually seen several centuries.
- Justified:
- Alice is a Physical God, and as such is immortal.
- Alice is a vampiress and in the setting vampires always stay as they used to be.
- Alice is a robot with Ragnarök Proofing.
- Alice is a space colonist and thus spent few hundred years in cold sleep.
- Alice is a space colonist and has experienced time dilation.
- Alice is using a human body as a vessel and her true form is that of an Eldritch Abomination.
- Alice can alter the perception of those who look at her to appear younger than she is.
- Inverted:
- Alice is sixteen years old in the world of hundreds-years-old immortals.
- Younger Than They Look
- Alice looks like a walking corpse that could fall apart into dust at any moment, yet she's only 20 years old.
- Really Was Born Yesterday
- Subverted:
- Alice looks twenty, but knows a lot of the past as if she's been there. But it turns out she's a time traveler...
- Alice rules the vampire court and looks like she's twenty. However, she really is twenty and the most powerful of them...
- Double Subverted:
- ...and The Doctor who's seven hundred years old.
- ...or so she says, to hide the fact that she's a million-year-old Eldritch Abomination.
- Parodied:
- Alice, who looks like she's twenty, has a voice of an old crone and keeps on complaining about "today's youth!".
- Alice is over 3000 years old. But, in immortal society, that's still considered part of childhood, and her dad who's 1 million years old complains about her childish attitude.
- Zig-zagged:
- Alice looks twenty, but she's a wise and talented witch, and readily admits that she uses magic to hide her true age. However, it turns out she was only born eight years ago, and makes herself look like a grownup because most people wouldn't take her seriously otherwise. However, it turns out she's the reincarnation of a powerful witch that lived for centuries, and in anticipation of her eventual death, used magic to arrange that she'd be reborn into a new body while retaining her old personality and memories.
- Alice just lies about her actual age to mess with everyone while never stating about it.
- Averted:
- Alice really is twenty.
- Alice is old and looks old.
- Enforced:
- Author wanted to have somebody to tell the first-hand account of events that happened six hundred years ago.
- Director of the show wants to have character that's both really old and physically attractive.
- Lampshaded: "Wow, you look really well for such an age."
- Exploited: An evil immortal being takes on the form of a child or an attractive 20-something person to better manipulate others.
- Defied: Totalitarian regime keeps careful records of everyone's birth and is killing everybody over the age of sixty, because they are terrified of immortals.
- Discussed: Bob and Charlie wonder if their coworker Alice could be older than she looks.
- Conversed: "You know this show about the seven-hundred-year-old vampiress." "Yes, though she looked twenty to me."
- Implied: Twenty-year-old Alice sometimes makes offhand comments about events that happened centuries ago as if she's seen them firsthand. She also has a picture of suspiciously similar twenty-year-old woman in baroque dress in her house.
- Deconstructed: After seven hundred years of her life Alice is bored of the same patterns repeating themselves. She can't really form close bonds with people because we die so quickly and, much as old people in Real Life, she can't adjust very well to the modern world.
- Reconstructed: She is, however, the only person who has even seen the defeat of the ancient Big Bad and when it returns, she's called to the rescue and her extensive knowledge proves useful beyond belief.
- Played For Laughs: Alice keeps on stumbling upon modern gadgets and always asks Bob and Charlie thousand different questions about each and every one of them.
- Played For Drama: Alice is going through prolonged Heroic BSoD because her family, friends and loved ones have died a long time ago, and she now goes out of her way to avoid forming attachments with new people, expecting to eventually outlive them as well.
You can be Really 700 Years Old by the time you end reading TV Tropes, you know.
