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Basic Trope: An older person brags about what they accomplished while their opponent was much younger.

  • Straight: To intimidate her enemy, 16-year-old Bob, the 40-year-old superhero Alice claims that she was fighting crime while he was still a baby.
  • Exaggerated: The 1000-year-old Alice says every single episode to the 16-year-old Bob that his 32-times-great-grandfather wasn't even a gleam in his 33-times-great-grandfather's eye when she defeated the previous Big Bad.
  • Downplayed: The 40-year-old Alice reminds the 30-year-old Bob that she was already a recognized hero when he was just starting out in crime.
  • Justified:
    • Considering their fight is less about physical strength than strategy, having Seen It All actually gives you more advantage than improvising strategies. Also, claiming you have experience is a good way to impress a Skilled, but Naive opponent.
    • Bob's strategies, while inventive, are somehow detached from reality, something Alice can exploit to her own benefit due to her concrete knowledge gained by experience.
  • Inverted: Alice the Kid Hero brags to adult criminal Bob that she's defeated lots of villains in 2 years while he took 20 to build up his gang into a real threat.
  • Subverted: Alice tries to boast about her long life, but Bob replies that he hacked into the Heroes "R" Us database and learned that she was actually a nobody until just a few years ago.
  • Double Subverted: ...to which Alice reveals that she was actually a secret agent who's indeed fought for a long time, it just wasn't in the database.
  • Parodied: Alice pauses the fight to invent accomplishments and take credit for others' work to Bob, even some accomplishments she just learned about two minutes ago.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice proudly boasts to Bob about her experience, but he replies that his youth and creativity are superior and that she's been outmatched by innovations in crime. However, Alice's knowledge is enough to defeat Bob... until he comes back out of the shadows with new, harder-to-counter methods.
  • Averted: Alice and Bob are both newcomers in vigilantism and crime respectively.
  • Enforced: In order to appeal to older audiences, the writers decide that they need to have a character's long career be presented as impressive.
  • Lampshaded: "Why would a genius like Bob lose against Alice only because she's old enough to be his mother?"
  • Defied: Despite having experience, Alice doesn't boast about it because she was a Teen Genius herself in her youth and defeated many "experienced" criminals.
  • Exploited: The hero organization always sends experienced heroes like Alice against young criminals not only to stop crimes, but also as a preventative and reintegrational method, to teach them the importance of patience and diligence as opposed to cheap shortcuts.
  • Discussed: "Alice is our most knowledgeable heroine. Even this smartass Bob can't do anything against her!"
  • Conversed: "Bob, I was fighting space aliens before you were even born."
  • Deconstructed: Bob gives Alice an angry speech about her flawed premise:
    "You think you're better than me because you've been a superhero since I was born? I started this life of crime only three years ago, and thanks to my 'amateur' talents, I've recruited half the teenagers in town, and made most of the citizens lose faith in you! Maybe if you old people didn't look down on youngsters so much, they wouldn't have been so eager to join me!"
  • Reconstructed: ???
  • Played for Laughs: Alice says that she defeated supervillains before Bob was even born... and he replies that he conquered his hometown before he was even born.

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