To-do list:
- Teens Are Short is supposed to be a trope that occurs when a series depicts teenage characters in general being shorter than adults, even though people in real life often hit their adult heights in their teenage years. Live action films or TV series do this by hiring shorter actors while animated series' will draw teenage characters shorter than adults. This is generally done to show a difference in power dynamic. Remove any examples that do not fit this definition; the trope is often misused to say that a specific teenage character in a series happens to be shorter than other characters in the series, even other teenagers. It's often found on character pages when this isn't intended to be a character trope.
- Clean up on-page examples.
- Clean up wicks.
Teens Are Short is supposed to be a trope that occurs when a series depicts teenage characters in general being shorter than adults, even though people in real life often hit their adult heights in their teenage years. Live action films or TV series do this by hiring shorter actors while animated series' will draw teenage characters shorter than adults. This is generally done to show a difference in power dynamic.
The trope is often misused to say that a specific teenage character in a series happens to be shorter than other characters in the series, even other teenagers. It's often found on character pages when this isn't intended to be a character trope.
I performed a wick check back in 2021 and while a couple of examples have fallen off, the pattern remains consistent. The results from the wick check back then:
- Correct Use: 11.8%
- Teen character who is just short, or the shortest in the cast: 45.1%
- Other Incorrect use (averted examples, ZCE, really another trope like Height Angst or Older Than They Look): 35.3%
- Unsure: 7.8%
I can't imagine the misuse has gone down drastically since the wick check and doing a quick comparison of the examples against the Teens Are Short wick list, most have still remained.
Possible solutions: Not sure, to be honest, since the misuse is so rampant. The name could be updated to address the Reality Is Unrealistic aspect and make the power dynamic and taller = older aspects more clear. Something like Teens Are Unrealistically Short, but less wordier?
A clean-up on misuse would likely wipe out most of the wicks, Though I get the feeling this trope is pretty common.
Wick check:
This is a wick check for Teens Are Short.Teens Are Short is about series where teenagers (in general, not just one character) are depicted as being shorter than adults, regardless of medium, even though this isn't the case in real life due to people hitting their full height during their early-to-mid teens. It is often misused to identify a teenager character who is shorter than their peers. The results of the wick check are as follows:
- Correct Use: 11.8%
- Teen character who is just short, or the shortest in the cast: 45.1%
- Other Incorrect use: 35.3%
- Unsure: 7.8%
Wicks checked: 51/51
- Film.Rebel Without A Cause: Most teens are played by shorter-than-average actors, such as 5'7" James Dean and Dennis Hopper, 5'5" Sal Mineo and 5'1" Natalie Wood. Corey Allen at 5'10" is an exception, but he's not especially tall either.
- KimPossible.Tropes S To Z: Despite being seniors and probably past puberty at the end of the show, neither Kim nor Ron pass an adult's shoulders note in terms of height.
- Manga.No Matter How I Look At It Its You Guys Fault Im Not Popular: Adults tower over the predominantly teenage cast without fail, even teenagers in the 17-18 age bracket. And poor Tomoko is dwarfed by most of her own peers.
- Podcast.Actors Life Podcast:
- Dawson Casting: Discussed a few times.
- Bobby was chosen over an actor who was the same age as his character in Victories but was Younger Than They Look, because of Teens Are Short.
- Dawson Casting: Discussed a few times.
- Series.Greek: All of the freshmen (Rebecca, Rusty, Calvin) are shorter than their "bigs" (Casey, Cappie, Evan). Averted with Lizzi, who's shorter than most of the ZBZ sisters even though she's older than all of them. Don't think the Lizzie bit fits. The rest seems okay, though being in a college setting may be pushing it.
- VideoGame.The Sims 2: Teen sims are shorter than those at the adult stage. Though young adult sims (seemingly about 18-21) are just as tall as normal adults. The teen stage does include all of puberty, though, and since the sims don't grow within individual stages, it would have to be somewhere in the middle of the range (so it wouldn't look weird growing from Child or to Young Adult/Adult) and is thus reasonably justified.
- Characters.Academy Of Merlin Graduated Tomas: Din Munrin
- Characters.Avatar The Last Airbender The Avatar: Aang. Korra is also listed as this in a shoehorned, 'averted' way, because she (5'7") happens to be shorter than her love interests.
- Characters.Black Clover Asta: Asta
- Characters.Danganronpa Kill Cure: Listed under the shortest male and female characters in the cast.
- Characters.Gemstones Plumbers And Hunters: Ari Caro.
- Characters.Gossip Girl: Eric van der Woodsen. This seems like one character just happens to be played by a short actor.
- Characters.Hang Time: Rico Bosco. Played straight and subverted, James Villani, who played Rico Bosco in season four, was the shortest of any of the 20 cast members in the series. Which says a lot considering most of the actors were close in height, with the sole exceptions of Reggie Theus, Dick Butkus, Kevin Bell and Robert Michael Ryan, who were relatively taller. This example is oddly written but looking up a few names of some of the male actors seems to indicate that some actors were 5'9", which isn't short among teens.
- Characters.Hunie Pop: Nikki Ann-Marie.
- Characters.Knights Of The Otherworld: Gabriel "Gabe" Lighthart/Kamen Rider Gai the Rhino Knight.
- Characters.Model Ronpa: Rika de Silva.
- Characters.My Family And Me: Melina "Midge" Amelia Mayhan.
- Characters.My Huntsman Academia Criminals: Neopolitan.
- Characters.The Heaven Cycle Applicants: "Mint".
- Characters.True Tears: Noe Isurugi.
- Characters.We Are Our Avatars: Seine Miyazaki.
- Characters.Your Wonderland: Shiki Hoshino. The page got removed, but the example was incorrect at the time
- Fanfic.Star Force DXD: 14-year old male character at 5'3", but only compared to one other teenage character.
- Roleplay.Wizards Vs Muggles: Played straight with Lita, who is shorter than all the commandos, Chess, Jay, Jamie, and Karla, and Charmdrummer, and Neville, and his wife...and Hermione... and the Malfoys...
- Series.Broadchurch: Chloe is a full head shorter than her (not particularly tall) mother.
- Series.Im In The Band: Tripp is notably shorter than everybody else.
- Series.The OC: Hilariously inverted with the girls. While Summer (5'1") and Anna (5'4") are both pretty short, the ones actually played by teens Marissa and Kaitlin are 5'8" and 5'7" respectively.
- StarTrekDeepSpaceNine.Tropes Q To Z: Jake and Nog. Both cases ended up subverted by Real Life Writes the Plot, as detailed on the trope page.
- YMMV.ARMS: Moe: Mechanica, the little Brainy Brunette who always has the happiest victory dance. Pothole at 'lit'.
- Characters.CDT Characters KM: Lists two characters as averted examples because they're around the height of adults.
- Characters.Com Media: Lists an averted example.
- Characters.Gemstones Plumbers And Hunters: Yatsuhashi Daichi. The example on the character discusses teens in general in this fanfic being shorter than adults, which would make more sense on the main page. The character is listed as averting this though.
- Characters.Motorcity: Averted with Mike, Chuck, and Dutch, who are about as tall as most adult men; played straight with Julie and Texas. The image on page doesn't actually depict Julie and Texas as being that much shorter than the other three characters.
- Characters.The Otherworld: Savannah Levine.
- Big Guy, Little Guy: Trinket and Cissy from Pepper Ann, the closest this series has to an Alpha Bitch (they're vain rather than mean, and lack the numbers and power to constitute a posse). Cissy is a Dumb Blonde Huge Schoolgirl. Trinket is short, although compared to her other classmates not by much; and as the one with the most common sense of the two (which again is not saying much), she's undoubtedly the leader. And you can count with one hand the number of episodes where they don't show up together, or at least one alongside the other. Pothole. Most of the 'teen' characters are about 12 years old and actually aren't much shorter than adults. They still have a few years to grow.
- Characters.Danganronpa Zero: Yūto Kamishiro. Actually is Older Than They Look.
- Characters.Fate Zero Humans: Waver Velvet. Seems to be Older Than They Look.
- Characters.Knots Landing: Olivia Cunningham. ZCE.
- Characters.Pokemon Reset Bloodlines The Main Group: Anabel. This is just Height Angst for a female character who really isn't that short (5'3").
- Characters.The Little Mermaid Titular Protagonists: Melody. Listed as downplayed trope, but Melody is just a 12-year old girl who likely hasn't reached her full height, as stated in the entry.
- Characters.Total Drama Comeback Series: Carol, the Excitable Enthusiast. ZCE.
- Characters.Welcome To Beacon Ultimate: Iris Melody Aurion. Female teenager listed as 5'7" being shorter than her parents.
- Creator.Elle Fanning: Averted example listed on a creator page.
- Creator.Sophia Lillis: Example listed on a creator page. The example got removed on the page sometime after the wick check was performed
- DependingOnTheArtist.Comic Books: Kitty Pride.
- There's also her age. It's not so bad these days, and it wasn't so bad right after her introduction, but for the middle years? Sometimes she looked 12, sometimes she looked 20, sometimes she looked shorter than Rachel and Meggan but still 20 and the writers clearly thought she was being made to actually look younger (leading to strange instances where what you've thought of as a grown woman for the past 10 issues reminds us she can't drive). Pothole. Somewhat ZCE. Hard to tell whether Rachel and Meggan are also short characters or if Kitty Pryde is just a bit shorter than them.
- Series.Stranger Things: Played straight with Nancy and her parents (and somewhat with Barb and her father, as Barb and her mother are tall women but Mr. Holland is a giant of a man) and justified in the case of some of the younger kids as they are growing in real-time. Naturally this is defied by Season 3 where both Jonathon and Will are taller than Joyce (played by the petite Winona Ryder)and Cara Buono (Karen Wheeler) has highlighted the difference in height between her and Finn Wolfard (Mike Wheeler)
. There's a lot of things discussed here that ultimately boils down to characters aging in real time to due their actors aging. Nancy also isn't much shorter than her mother (5'4" vs. 5'5").
- WesternAnimation.Barbie Star Light Adventure: Vague Age: Due to their height it's easy to assume they are all teenagers but it's never stated outright how old any of the assembled team are. Instead we simply know that they are younger than the king and Barbie's dad. Pothole, but the discussion here about height and comparison of female characters who may either be teenagers or young women to adult men (who tend to be taller) doesn't really point to Teens Are Short.
- Characters.Despicable Me The Gru Family: Margo. She only turns 12 by the 3rd Despicable Me film. A 13 year old boy is also shown being this short, but for Margo, is this possibly Pint-Sized Kid instead?
- Characters.The Nostalgia Chick: This seems to talk more about the actress's height instead of any kind of story-telling convention.
- SelfDemonstrating.Damian Wayne: On the one hand, he's 14 years old at 5'2"-5'4", but this seems to just be one character in the Batman universe. The page got removed
- Toys.LEGO Friends: The entry on this page states that the Lego characters seem to be the same heights for adults and teens, though adults are taller in the show. Seems more appropriate on the Friends page or the entry could be rewritten.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Jul 17th 2023 at 5:17:39 AM
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![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I really like the name Normal Adults Short Teens.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
Calling in favor of renaming since there's agreement on whether to rename, but we'll need a crowner to decide the name since there's been more disagreement on that. I'll hook one soon since we already have enough suggestions.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Jul 10th 2023 at 8:19:31 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
The crowner's up.
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I don't care for "normal adult" phrasing because the actual heights don't matter as much as the relative heights. Casting a 4'11" actor to play a teenager next to to a 5'3" "short" actor playing an adult would be an example. So would casting a 5'7" actor to play the teenager next to a 6'2" "tall" actor.
My issue with the various "Teens Are Shorter Than Adults"/"All Teens Are Short" names are that I believe they would fall into the similar problem of "This specific teen is short" that the current name is suffering from (despite the current name already being plural), so I was trying to suggest a name that indicated more clearly that this is more of a Trope in Aggregate.
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this was a concern I had but tbh it's a larger issue with Trope in Aggregate in general. in this case, i have wondered if making it aversion only would be better, but i'm not all that committed to the idea tbh.
Isn't the aversion of Teens Are Short just "teens are as tall as adults", which is how it normally works? Why would it be a notable aversion to call out?
Because teens being shorter than their parents is also how things normally work. While I 100% understand what the trope is getting at (teens are frequently presented as being shorter than their parents, despite many teens being taller than their parents IRL), this leads to an example list of every teen that is shorter than their parent. But plenty of teens are the same height or shorter than their parents, because genetics are weird like that. We're kind of implicitly saying every short teen is in line with this stereotype / using this visual shorthand, when many examples are probably just reflecting the reality that many teens simply are just shorter than their parents (especially if puberty hasn't hit yet).
To avoid that then, if the portrayal is as widespread as the Trope in Aggregate status implies, then it might be more noteworthy to point out the fewer times when this isn't followed versus every time it may (or may not) be.
But like I said, I'm very much not fully committed to the aversion-only path and this isn't a quirk specific to this trope and it's come up before, like the convo on the Stock Cartoon Animal Depiction draft (bullet 2 of my comment here I think is somewhat applicable).
Edited by amathieu13 on Jul 11th 2023 at 6:26:49 AM
Right, but the trope isn't "teens are shorter than their parents". It's a general pattern in a series where the average teen is shorter than the average adult. If it's being used to say "Alice is 14 and shorter than her parents Bob and Carol", that's misuse.
Sorry, I had a brain fart and wrote parents, when I meant adult in that post. I'll leave it unedited for accountability purposes but my argument remains the same if you substitute adults in. This is especially the case for live-action works where the height of the character isn't really in control of the creator unlike in animated works.
Also, how are we defining average though? How many teens in a work versus adults need there be to justify that an example fits the trope? In the wick check, there's a Kim Possible example in the correct folder that only mentions Ron and Kim, despite there being plenty of background high schoolers in the show: is that actually misuse because it's only two?
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
Did the wick check pick up enough aversions to add this to No Straight Examples, Please!? If it did, whether to add it to that index could be decided with another crowner after we've finalized the name.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Jul 11th 2023 at 12:24:22 PM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
The wick check picked up 5/51 aversions (9.8%) which given how much misuse there is, puts it slightly below correct usage.
At the time, I added the Kim Possible example to the correct pile because it was one of the few examples that looked correct and I recall a number of teens in that show being around the same height as Kim and Ron, with maybe the football players at the high school being significantly taller. This is why I brought up American Dad earlier to gauge whether the trope was still in effect if a smaller cast of short teens (i.e. the primary characters) applied but we sort of skipped over that to decide on a rename.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
Well, if I did the math correctly (which isn't guaranteed, since, as I mentioned in the Evil Is Sexy thread, I'm kind of sleep-deprived at the moment), translating that ratio into the total amount of wicks would mean at least 85 wicks, which is much smaller than the current amount, but still healthy.
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How sweet it is
Calling in favor of Short Teens, Tall Adults.
Tall Adults, Short Teens will redirect.
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Question about the redirect: do we do redirects for tropes that might change how it's alphabetised? I'm just thinking of possible duplication issues if people look for the trope among the S-letters, don't see it, so add it in, not realising that it's listed under the T-letter tropes because of the redirect option.
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
Whether we have redirects is decided on a case-by-case basis, but whether we use redirects is already set in stone as far as I know. Alternate spellings (particularly American and Commonwealth Spellings) are acceptable everywhere, and gendered redirects are acceptable on Characters/ pages. Other redirects exist either for searchability or to catch inbounds (the latter generally for old names for renamed pages).
If anyone violates the rules on when to use redirects, swapping the redirect with the primary name is a free action.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Jul 15th 2023 at 7:19:25 AM
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Just stoic wisdom.
Do renames get moved by mod or by "attach a redirect and make it free for anyone to do"?
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(she/her)
We do both but usually the latter is done if the trope needs to be rewritten first. I am not sure if this is the case here.
Macron's notes
I feel like the trope works as-is and don't know if it benefits from needing to be rewritten to be potentially stricter, but it'd be good to get a couple more thoughts about that, since it seems the rename has at least been decided on.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
I moved the page because I don't think it needs a rewrite, and the rename was due to misuse.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Going through wicks currently, and a number of examples are "This one teen character is shorter than all adult characters", which is especially the case if there's not many teen characters in the show to begin with.
To confirm, are we considering that misuse, since there aren't other teen characters to compare?
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Should we update the OP to account for the revised description?
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Sounds good on paper (he/him)
I'm not seeing that the description was revised, especially since we only voted to rename and without changing the definition. I even said I didn't think a rewrite was needed when I moved the page. Did you post in the wrong thread?
Edited by GastonRabbit on Jul 18th 2023 at 9:19:42 AM
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Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
Actually, I misread an earlier post. Apologies.
Crown Description:
Consensus was to rename Teens Are Short because the trope is supposed to be one that occurs when a series depicts teenage characters in general being shorter than adults, but a lot of examples lack the comparison between teenagers and adults. What should the trope's new name be?
What about something like Normal Adults, Short Teens?
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