Discussion Main / MayDecemberRomance

I clicked on the picture and read about BBC's May to December and... the relationship there doesn't count as a May December Romance because the couple is only 27 years apart (53-26=27). Should the criteria maybe be reduced to 25 or 20 years? I think it's odd to establish the trope in a way that the name-coining media doesn't fit.

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Examples not fitting trope, and other problems, started by Vilui on Feb 8th 2012 at 10:29:24 PM

I am sorry, but this Trope is starting to annoy me, the May-December Romance(MDR), at its heart, means [Older A Dating Younger B].

I find this whole age restriction limiting the overall scope of this page. With the focus being on such extremes all we end up looking at are the actors age, or the charters designed model, and forced to exclude perfectly good examples of what the MDR is all about.

What it does to the narrative, what it does with the characters, what it does to the setting, and sometimes what it does with the fan-base. (It can make the audience like a character they hated, or hate a character they loved)

From the perspective of someone new to the site, it may appear that age restriction was just put in place so the MDR title can still be relevant, I get it, Older dating Younger is a boring title and you do what you do to keep things fresh and interesting, but the Trope comes first. And as things stand, it seems like the age restriction is just making it so someone's clever idea can stay relevant. And many cases of the MDR being an important part of the narrative of a story, is thrown out the window because it is a 18 year old and 40 year old, instead of a 3 year old and a 100 year old.

It shouldn't be, "If character A is 21-40 and character B is 60- then okay"

It should, "if the significant age difference played an intricate part of the romantic sub-or main-plot then okay"

DISCLAIMER

I am not saying that anyone is WRONG or someone F@#%ED UP, I am just expressing my annoyance as a fan of this site. If you think this is just a personal problem of mine and doesn't translate to the rest of the Casual Tropers then that's fine, if you think this concern isn't worth looking into, great. BUT, don't try to explain away my opinion, this is my opinion, I don't claim it to be anything other than that. sorry if that came out as harsh, I was going for firm, I have been patronised so many times I am sick of it (no one here, but other forums and wikis)

DISCLAIMER DONE

Ranted at 4:00:Am with no sleep, so......sorry

Re Black Canary & Green Arrow. IIRC this is more convoluted because the age gap is a product of later retcons rather than at the time.

It's my understanding that it wasn't until about the early 1980s and the creation of the All-Star Squadron that the Earth 2 adventures were explicitly anchored to the Second World War. Before this Earth 2 seemed to operate on a similar sliding timescale but with its age of heroes starting about fifteen to twenty years before Earth 1's.

Black Canary was a teenager in the original stories (only debuting some years into the age of heroes) and so would have been in her mid 30s by the time of the Earth 2/Earth 1 crossovers. This would have made her a contemporary of the Earth 1 Green Arrow when the two were paired up in 1970. However the subsequent decision to anchor Earth 2's age of heroes to the Second World War suddenly yanked the gap with Earth 1's age much wider and made Black Canary so much older. Hence the bizarre retcon that following a battle she was near death and had her memories transferred to her long lost identical looking daughter who arrived on Earth 1.

This got rid of any ickiness about the age gap. However it forgot about the story where she had tried to romance the Earth 1 Larry Lance, who at the time of the publication was the counterpart of her husband but was now retconned into being the counterpart of her father.

This example keeps appraing, but sadly, never with proper context, or proper Example Indentation. This wiki does not allow generalized examples like this.

• A favorite trope of Danielle Steel, and one where she frequently displays a blatant Double Standard. However, the Double Standard is not based on gender, but rather the type of character—a hero/heroine can easily date or marry someone 20-25 older/younger—or in two extreme cases, 40-something years older. Even a virtual case of ephebophilia was presented as a romance—a 40-something year old man and a 16 year old girl (she was his daughter's best friend) fell in love and planned to marry as soon as she turned 18. Meanwhile, a villain is said to look ridiculous dating someone a mere 15 years younger than him.

• A favorite trope of Danielle Steel, and one where she frequently displays a blatant Double Standard based the type of character. As long as someone is a hero or heroine, they can easily date or marry someone 20-25 years older/younger—or in two extreme cases, 40-something years older. Anyone objecting is in the wrong. The worst example of this is in the novel Family Album, where a 49 year old man and a 15 year old girl (she was his daughter's best friend) fell in love. Despite the man himself admitting that this is statutory rape—they consummated the relationship while she was still underage—they married as soon as she turned 18. Of course, her parents and brother were seen as the bad guys for their completely reasonable outrage. Meanwhile, on the villainous side, a 40 year old man is outright described as "looking like an idiot" with a woman merely 15 years than him. And the younger person in this case is almost inevitably a villain themself—a Gold Digger, airheaded, trampy, etc. Even her few gay characters don't escape this—the Gay Best Friend of the heroine of the novel Dating Game is blissfully happy with his companion, who is of course, 20-years his senior.

EDIT: This write-up actually contains some ok example, and can be moved to the page (though Example Indentation needs to be fixed)

• A favorite trope of Danielle Steel. Several of her books have the female protagonist paired with a much older man. In two extreme examples, the man is 40 years older than the woman in question.

• A frequent Danielle Steel trope. While most average 20-25 years, at least three extremes are 34 (even worse, the girl was 15 when the relationship began), 40, and 44.

These were all found in the history of the page. One such example is now commented out as ZCE. If you want to expand it, please make sure you have a look at How To Write An Example. Also, these pairs might fit better on Age-Gap Romance.

If you cannot remember the name of the book or details of the examples, you may use our tool for this You know that show? — people are generally very helpful there, or in some cases a simple google search helps a lot as well.

"Quite obviously Truth in Television, or else we probably wouldn't have a well-known phrase for it."

There are well-known phrases for so many fantasy and sci-fi concepts that I don't think it's obvious that if something has a name, it exists.

I changed "Jesus's ancestors Ruth and Boaz" to "King David's ancestors Ruth and Boaz", since that's totally undisputed, being in the text itself. I know that some people dispute Jesus's descent from King David, but nobody, to the best of my knowledge, disputes King David's descent from Ruth and Boaz. People who want to draw a further line from King David are perfectly capable of doing so.

Removed:

• The main couple of Wolf's Rain qualify for this on two levels: Cheza looks to be about 13, but is Really Two Hundred Years Old, and Kiba's human form looks about 20, but he's only about 2 or 3 in wolf years. Either way you slice it, there's quite an age gap.

The context that is about age appearance-wise is very insufficient, and what is more, ages 13 and 20 do not count at all as an exmple of this trope — read the description: one has to be a senior! i.e. above 60, 65, not a senior in high school or college.

The other part fits to December Mayfly or whateever trope we have for that.

Does the marriage of Fred and Ethel Mertz count as this? William Frawley was 22 years Vivian Vance's senior, one of the many reasons the two intensely disliked each other off-camera (Vance thought Frawley was too old to be her husband, Frawley thought Vance was a sniveling little girl). But I'm not sure the characters themselves were ever directly described as being of very different ages.

Well, I went ahead and deleted a bunch of examples did not fit the trope description. Hopefully, I didn't delete any legit examples in the process.

OK, this page is a MESS.

I tried to go through and do some cleanup, but there's far too much wrong.

We should probably split off the May-September pairings as a separate trope, or, (IMHO) just declare them NOT A TROPE, and purge all such example from here. This page has far too much "ooh, there's an age gap, it must be May-Dec" going on, and desperately needs help.

Just wondering; does 23 and 17 count as this trope? Certainly not "huge", but still qualifies as shotacon.

I removed this example from Real Life. It's speculation and has too much natter attached to it.

• Dame Margot Fonteyn, prima ballerina assoluta of the Royal Ballet and one of the greatest classical ballerinas in history, and her best and most famous partner, Rudolf Nureyev. While there is no absolute proof they ever consummated their relationship, it is quite probable that they did, and they remained each other's dearest friend and confidante until Fonteyn's death in 1991. The shocker? Fonteyn was nineteen years his senior, and in fact was at the point in her career when most thought she would retire when Nureyev arrived in England. Instead, they would dance together for another fifteen years.
  • Except... Nureyev was quite openly gay. They were more The Straight Will And Grace.
    • So it was a May December Friendship?
    • Or If It's You, It's OK?

For Lord Baden-Powel, I removed the statement about maintaining contact with little girls, because I couldn't find any other reference to this.

I also added the fact his liking of adolescent boys was speculation, also because that's what other sources on the matter state. It's a little vague right now, but that's intentional since from what I gathered, it was concluded that that might have been his sexual preference by a prolific biographer, but even that isn't something everyone agrees with him on.

Just thought I'd let it know, since I don't know for a fact that those things are wrong and because I couldn't check the writer's sources (because this wiki does not require sources).

In the opening, there is mention of 50 years old being ancient in the middle ages.

This isn't true. In the middle ages people could very well still live into their 80s if they took care of themselves.

The perception is caused by the average lifespan being so much lower, but that's just an artefact of statistics because infant mortality was so much higher.

If you take 100 people, of whom 65% live to an average of 70 and the other 35% live to 0, you get an average lifespan of 45.5 despite what is arguably a high chance of living to over 70 provided you make it past your first birthday.

This one seems to be VERY full of trope bashing and lots of assumptions coming from fans. And there's the explicit bashing of the Sesshoumaru/Rin couple, which may be the real intention of the one/s who wrote it.

• In fact, Rumiko Takahashi seems to dislike this trope. Though it is invoked in Maison Ikkoku, where Kyoko's husband Soichirou was also her teacher at high school, the man died not long after the wedding and her own parents at least once expressed distaste with Kyoko having married him in the first place. Later, when Yusaku Godai becomes the target of a Precocious Crush by his own student, Ibuki Yagami, he is disgusted by and quite disapproving of the idea. Meanwhile, in Inu Yasha, she tried as hard as she could to sink the Fan-Preferred Couple of Sesshomaru and Rin. For those unfamiliar with the series, Sesshomaru is a Really 700 Years Old dog-demon who, Draco in Leather Pants aside, is one of the coldest and most ruthless characters in the series and avoids being a major villain in the early part of the series only because he's really too apathetic. Rin, on the other hand, is a human girl who is barely prepubescent, and the source of Sesshomaru grudgingly realising humans aren't entirely insignificant.
  • Well, considering that the series' alpha couple are a teenage human girl and a half demon who was probably at least 30 even before his decades-long forced nap, her protests fall a bit flat. Sorry, Ms. Takahashi...
    • Not the same, since demon aging is different from human aging. Demons age much slower than humans, so Inuyasha, at his age, is an adolescent like Kagome.
    • Also, Rin is an 8-year old girl while Sesshomaru is around his early twenties in appearance. Kagome is fifteen and Inuyasha is about fifteen or sixteen himself. There is a major difference there. (Now, whether or not Sess/Rin will happen when Rin grows up is anyone's guess...)

I myself really dislike Sess/Rin and far prefer Rin/Kohaku, but sheeeeesh. Don't put words in the mouth of the author to spit on a couple you hate.

Is a difference of five years in some cases considered May–December Romance or is it just defined as a small age gap between two characters?

is there any manga that have a male studnet falling in love with an older girl?

"There's allegedly a biological basis for it. Women genetically tend to be attracted to higher-status men with more resources, while men as a rule have it hard-wired to prefer young, presumably fertile women. It comes down to that reproduction thing. Mandatory Disclaimer - Before someone flies off the handle, these are tendencies and not absolutes, and they have not moral but evolutionary rationals. Simply put, way back when it was better to be the wife (or even concubine) of a high-status male than of a better-looking dirt-farmer." The line "Women genetically tend to be attracted to higher-status men with more resources, while men as a rule have it hard-wired to prefer young, presumably fertile women." is based on nothing more than a theory, and the disclaimer does not address this, merely sidestepping to appear neutral.