Improbable Age

"Logan's Run rule: RPG characters are young. Very young. The average age seems to be 15, unless the character is a decorated and battle-hardened soldier, in which case he might even be as old as 18. Such teenagers often have skills with multiple weapons and magic, years of experience, and never ever worry about their parents telling them to come home from adventuring before bedtime. By contrast, characters more than twenty-two years old will cheerfully refer to themselves as washed-up old fogies and be eager to make room for the younger generation."

- The Grand List of Console RPG Cliches

A character whose age seems inappropriate with their occupation or position given the amount of experience they would need, whether or not said age is actually important within the storyline. Tends to lean to the younger side, resulting in the Teen Genius, Kid Hero, and Hollywood Homely for female characters all inexplicably under thirty. In benign cases, it's because the writers assume the audience better identifies with characters their own age.

In some cases, an age that is improbable on first glance may actually be Truth in Television. In ages past, life expectancy was shorter and people needed to be capable at a younger age; in fact, studies seem to indicate that adolescence is a modern creation. This has produced a very curious effect where the longer humans live, the longer the age gap of competence tends to widen. It also must be noted that many of the examples below occur in violent settings; people growing up in a warlike environment have no choice but to adapt and learn to survive, and the faster the better.

For characters whose age seems inappropriate given their maturity (rather than competence), see Wise Beyond Their Years. If the people running a society are improbably young, see Teenage Wasteland. Can be easily hand waved by making a character Older Than They Look, or even Really Seven Hundred Years Old. May lead to Child Soldiers. Contrast Competence Zone.

Anime
" If I may say so, I do not believe there are any other normal third graders with the title librarian at the Infinite Library."
 * A minor subversion in Neon Genesis Evangelion. Though the series features the typical teenager mecha pilots, the organizations combating the Angels are working on other plans that do not depend on child pilots, who they don't take very seriously and have serious doubts about, for good reason.
 * Played straight with Ritsuko Akagi and Misato Katsuragi: respectively the Evangelion program's head of all things sciency and its field commander, despite both being in their twenties. Gendo may also apply, as he's only 48 despite being the head of the most powerful military organization on Earth. Then again, he may have got to that level through the power of scheming.
 * And in Rebuild, Asuka's actually a captain. This is at least somewhat plausible with the practice of making civilians officers when they have rare and important skills.
 * This could all be explained by the massive death toll Second Impact and its fallout wrought on the world: when half the human population dies off, older and more experienced people are going to be a lot more scarce.
 * Sousuke Sagara in Full Metal Panic! is 16 at the beginning of the animé, but a fearsomely-skilled sergeant in a paramilitary organization, although this is explained by a history as a child soldier in Afghanistan; its also a way to logically hang around the schoolgirl-aged Chidori.
 * His commander, Teletha "Tessa" Testarossa, is about the same age and has her position almost solely by virtue of the bizarre racial memory gift possessed by those called The Whispered, which meant that she designed the submarine.
 * Sousuke's colleague Kurz Weber also qualifies, though not to quite the same extreme as Sousuke and Tessa; he's only nineteen at the start of the series and the Light Novels eventually reveal that he began training as a sniper at the age of about fifteen.
 * Most of the main cast in Soul Eater are 13 - 16 years old. It's pretty impressive for 13-year-old Maka to be so good at slicing through pre-Kishins that she nearly turned her partner into a Death Scythe at the start of the series, the strongest position a weapon can get to and later (in the anime at least)
 * With Spartoi demonstrating just how 'elite' these teenagers are, Kid's the only questionable example, in that he is not human and
 * Ranma Saotome of Ranma 1/2 is a world-class martial artist capable of feats impossible for a mere 7th-dan black belt, and he's only 16 at the end of the series. (This is partially explained by his father Genma's slave-driver-esque training regimen.)
 * Of course, he STARTED the series at 16 as well, so that was a ridiculously busy year.
 * The Slayers has the four main protagonists. Lina in particular is possibly the only sorceress in the world able to manifest the power of the world's Guardian of the Multiverse, the one being above God and Satanic figures Ciefeed and Shabranigdo respectively, the Lord of Nightmares, and utilize it effectively. Her magical level is also noted to be much higher than average. At the start of the series, she's a tender fifteen.
 * Zelgadis the chimera sticks out even more, depending on the adaptation. He's a hyper-intelligent chimera, able to strategize like a general, utilize effective swordplay and magic, and use a nautical sextant with ease. Throw in the ability to play the guitar in the anime, and you have an ace of a sorcerer at nineteen (or sixteen, in the anime).
 * Princess Amelia is a well-rounded priestess and an effective healer, not as powerful as Lina, but being a fourteen (anime)/fifteen (novels) year old diplomat is nothing to sneeze at.
 * Gourry is a phenomenal swordsman, but is twenty-two at the start of the series, and Word of God stated that he was a mercenary/soldier since seventeen. Depending on where you live, that's actually not uncommon in Real Life, so he averts this trope to a degree.
 * Amuro Ray from Mobile Suit Gundam was an ace mecha pilot at the age of 16. This was a hold over from Super Robot series where the pilots of Humongous Mecha were sometimes teenagers. Slightly subverted in the fact that, despite his age, he has as much time in the cockpit as anyone on his side, since he's literally the only one who ever took the original prototype of the weapon into combat.
 * Kamille Bidan of Zeta Gundam is even crazier: he designed the eponymous hyper-advanced mobile suit he ends up piloting. It's handwaved that he's been an amateur mobile suit designer for years... but a Gundam?
 * Uso Ewin of Victory Gundam was an expert mecha pilot at the age of 13. Handwaved by the fact that he grew up playing Mobile Suit simulators for an arcade. It's also Lampshaded repeatedly by almost everyone he meets: both his allies and enemies simply cannot believe the pilot of the Victory is a kid.
 * There is, in the Universal Century timeline, exactly one Gundam protagonist over the age of twenty. Shiro Amada (24).
 * Now also Hughes Curro (32) and Sherry Allison (24), from the oncoming Gundam 0081. Erik Blanque from the same show is a borderline case, as he's 20. There's also a number of older characters in the spinoffs like MS IGLOO.
 * In the Tomino's own novels, that arguably represent his vision of UC more authentically (read: without Executive Meddling), Amuro is 18, and a military cadet, sent to train with the first Federation Mobile Suits. He still falls into the cockpit, but at least he's officially sanctioned to do so.
 * Gundam Wing's OAV Endless Waltz is especially inexplicable, with Mariemaia Khushrenada leading a rebellion despite being seven years old. (Granted, she was a figurehead for the most part, but the Man Behind the Man was seeing that she got some in-field experience, too. The age of her father Treize would seem to imply he became a father at 17.)
 * The manga prequel, Episode Zero, goes wild with the trope. Treize was commanding soldiers way back then, one of whom was a 12-year-old Lucrezia Noin.
 * The main series is also entirely guilty. Zech Marquise is a respected colonel within OZ and an master mobile suit pilot at the age of 19, and his equally skilled Love Interest Lucrezia Noin is in charge of OZ's elite pilot training academy at the same age. Treize Khushrenada is the leader of the entire organization at 24. The Gundam pilots, who were only 15 during were stealing mobile suits, fighting in skirmishes, and beating trained mercenaries around that same time; in this case, however, it's a bit more believable, as they are stated to have been trained as fighters since they were in nappies. Vaguely more palatable by the fact they have about as much experience in mobile suits as anyone else; the MS itself is supposedly only about 20 years old in Wing.
 * Still, by the age of fifteen Wufei.
 * Most of these unusually young characters look about 5-10 years older than they actually are, so it's only when their ages are pointed out that it seems strange.
 * Mobile Suit Gundam 00 also has a little bit of this in its first season, although it gets justified in-show in a way that it borders on both Subversion and Deconstruction; protagonist Setsuna F. Seiei begins the show at sixteen years old . Allelujah Haptism is similarly 19 . Soma Peires is in a similar situation to Allelujah. Feldt Grace is a Bridge Bunny at 14, with her justification (mostly only brought up in side material) being that.
 * This also basically disappears by the "Zeta 00" season of the show; four years pass, this after the first season takes nearly a year, so by then just about the entire cast is at least in their early to mid 20s, which is still slightly young but not at all unheard of for a real-life combat pilot (with a now-huge majority of the cast being near, at or older than 30 years). The only prominent teens even left on-cast are Feldt (who's now 19) and 14-year-old Mileina Vashti, who's the daughter of the chief engineer of the Cool Ship and has ostensibly been around this stuff all her life and ardently wants to help out as a Bridge Bunny. All the characters had their appearances suitably altered to reflect their aging.
 * Gundam AGE looks set to continue the trend, with 14-year-old protagonist Flit Asuno having built the Gundam.
 * And then he gets one-upped by Desil Galette, 7-year-old Humongous Mecha Ace Pilot. Helps that he has Psychic Powers, but even so...
 * Kio Asuno of the third generation gets a similar excuse to Usso: he grew up playing Mobile Suit simulators, so at 13 he can pilot the Gundam very well. He also has his grandfather Flit, a highly skilled and experienced pilot, as a co-pilot.
 * Edward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist is quite young to be a Major in the Army and a State Alchemist... but here, everyone knows this, he's considered something of a genius for it. Ed does actually visibly mature, leading enough people to humorously assume he's simply very short much to his annoyance. In the manga, at least, it's explicitly stated that passing the state alchemist exam (for which there's no minimum age to take) automatically makes you a Major.
 * The Amestrian military as a whole has a ton of people who are Improbable Age. Some of the most blatant are Roy Mustang who is in his late 20's and is a Colonel. Hughes who was the same age was a Lt. Colonel, and Olivia Milla Armstrong who is in her early to mid 30's is a Major General. It's justified by showing that killing a superior officer is a great way to get promoted in the Amestrian government.
 * And as an alchemist, Mustang also started out as a Major, so he could have anywhere between 7-16 years to be promoted two ranks, without breaking canon.
 * It probably helps that Mustang is something of an Ace, too.
 * Given that Amestris has been in a constant state of war for over three hundred years, being a high-ranking officer at the age of 20-something is justified even without killing ones commanding officer (which was only done because said officer was an arrogant fool). Constant war, after all, means a constant need to replace dead superiors, and thus anybody skilled enough to stay alive is likely to be promoted to very high ranks.
 * In addition to being a fully-trained mage (stronger than professionals in their 40s), Negi Springfield of Mahou Sensei Negima has been assigned to be the English teacher of a diverse group of 31 teenage girls. He was not quite ten when he was assigned to the latter post.
 * And let's not forget his father, who at ten years old won the last Mahora Tournament, and could fly without a staff and essentially teleport. Gathering a team of badasses and becoming a war hero at thirteen, he receives the title of Thousand Master at age fifteen.
 * Negi himself already managed a draw against Rakan, 40-something years old, just as strong as his father and guess what...he's still ten.
 * Don't forget that prior to the beginning of the series Negi learned perfect Japanese in mere few weeks.
 * Negi himself may be the front runner but his class still contains several. Several have possible justifications, but Kaede, Ku Fei and Hakase stand out because they lack any. At the age of fifteen they are a kung fu master capable of shattering a mountain with her bare hands (Ku Fei), a Ninja skilled enough to take on a black dragon single handed (Kaede) or a Mad Scientist who helped create and is responsible for maintaining and upgrading Chachamaru.
 * Seto Kaiba of Yu-Gi-Oh! is a sixteen-year-old inventor, pilot, and sole owner of a successful billion-dollar gaming empire (still a stretch even at his dub-raised age of 18); however, how he managed to attain this was a major plot point of the 'Virtual World' Arc. Much like Ranma, the hellish schooling forced on him by his adoptive father may have something to do with it.
 * Duke Devlin is also a sixteen-year-old inventor and the owner of a huge gaming store. Not quite on Kaiba's level, but still.
 * The Astronauts in Rocket Girls are justified as having been chosen because they are 16-year-old girls and much lighter than adults. Girls have already done most of their growing by age sixteen. You'd be much better off finding adult women with small bones.
 * Yukari was just the only/first tiny woman available when one was needed.
 * Rebecca Miyamoto of Pani Poni Dash!, who graduated from MIT at 11 and is now a high school teacher. She's like an exaggerated Distaff Counterpart version of Negi.
 * In Mai-HiME, nobody except Mai finds it odd that Mashiro, the Fuka Academy director, is only 11 years old.
 * In the manga, she really is as young as she looks.
 * Every single player in Prince of Tennis. They're supposedly in junior high (7th, 8th, 9th grade), although none of ninth graders look that way; one is often mistaken for a teacher. Not to mention how the twelve-year old main character can cream professional adult players without even breaking a sweat. But he can't beat his father, though.
 * Revolutionary Girl Utena tends to be a bit of a shock when we hear Utena is only about 13 or 14 years old, with some other characters not much older, considering what they get up to...
 * The Time-Space Administration Bureau of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha doesn't seem to have any minimum age requirement to join its Armed Forces. Nanoha, Fate, and Hayate became Contract Mages at nine. Chrono was already an officer at fourteen (and while the Admiral who's his commanding officer is also his mother, no indication of nepotism is made). Actually, child officers in Nanoha doesn't seem to be out of the ordinary. After all, no one bats an eyelash at being ordered around by Vita, who despite being several centuries old, has the outward appearance of a six year old child; Hayate notes in the first Sound Stage that she would be in first grade if she were going to school. Despite her apparent age, Vita considers herself an adult, even if she doesn't always act like one.
 * Also notable are the character's appearances after a Time Skip between seasons. Chrono's vaguely-forties mother is the only normal character who doesn't appear older.
 * Yuuno, who's approximately the same age as Nanoha, was the one who originally excavated the Lost Logia. Alone.
 * Vivio, while still in third grade, holds the title of librarian at the Infinity Library. lampshades this when Vivio suggests that she should address her as a normal third grader.


 * Yuuno was appointed chief librarian of the Infinite Library at age 15.
 * According to Sound Stage M2, Fate became an Enforcer at age 12.
 * It also appears to be something of a sticking point for non-magical military personal; during a discussion between Hayate and an officer whom she outranks (and is probably in at least her thirties), who is herself aide to a general in at least his late forties, the women makes a slight snide reference to the idea of magical talent letting one shoot through the ranks.
 * Mahoromatic pulls a similar thing, where Suguru's teacher, a comedically-perverted teacher nearing Christmas Cake status, appears in a Distant Finale yet looks exactly the same.
 * Not quite so unbelievable in The Daughter of Twenty Faces as main character Chiko's physical accomplishments tend to be gymnastic, and tween-to-early-teen girls are noted for their flexibility and are a staple of the Olympics, and her powers of insight are not out of place for a smart, curious girl; that said, she still seems a little young to be dodging armed men, bluffing her way out of incredible danger and making off with artifacts of incalculable value. Much of the rest of the cast does comment on this, however, and part of her training is proving that she can be of value.
 * By these standards, Azumanga Daioh's Chiyo Mihama almost seems to be slacking off, as at age ten, she's only just starting high school.
 * Ridiculously common in series about wild animals with social structures involving a single leader. The example that comes most clearly to my mind is the anime series Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin, and for that matter, its sequel, Ginga Densetsu Weed too. Somewhat justified however, in that many animals including dogs are considered more or less adults within a few years old.
 * Ash or possibly any other Pokémon Trainer who starts his/her quest at age 10. This involves leaving their parents and families to travel across the world on foot, facing off against as-yet-untamed monsters with potentially deadly Elemental Powers, and camping without a tent in the woods like old pros. And Ash's mother sends him off cheerfully with nothing but a backpack full of gear and a reminder to keep his underwear washed.
 * The Japanese novels actually go into a bit of detail about this, explaining that A) 10 years old is considered the age of adulthood in the Pokémon world - with all of the legal implications that entails, and B) Ash's mom was a young mother who wanted her son out of her life as soon as possible so she could re-capture her youth.
 * One iteration of the Manga mentions in the second chapter that Ash only has a short leave of absence from school while he goes on his journey as he laments how unproductive the first hours of his quest have been.
 * Plus, Pokémon Centers tend to be excellently run rest stops with practically all the comforts of a hotel, and free care for your Pokémon.
 * Lampshaded here.
 * In Pokémon Special, White owns her own company despite probably only being around 14.
 * It's something of a stretch for the audience to believe that the now eighteen years old Christopher Thorndyke in Sonic X constructed a fully functioning portal that allowed him to transfer between worlds, gained his pilot's licence and became a black belt in Karate in six years between the end of one series and the beginning of the next. They're all possible, but accomplishing all of them in the same time span (when he was previously little more than an annoying twelve year old) is somewhat more incredible. Amazingly enough this characterization jump helped him rather than hindered him.
 * Played with in Martian Successor Nadesico when the 12 year old science officer explains the "recent trend" in "young, attractive captains" to the 20 year old Genius Ditz heroine using obvious expies of Anime spaceship captains.
 * In Baccano, Firo Prochainezo becomes an executive member of a Camorra organization at the age of eighteen. While this may not be as impressive as some of the examples above, it's enough (in the novels) for another character to immediately disbelieve it and then subsequently accuse him of sleeping his way up the ranks.
 * Meanwhile, Firo's old friend Luck Gandor was acting as an executive of the Gandor family business at fifteen, if not younger. There's some deconstruction to this, however. Luck didn't get the position because he was spectacularly gifted, but because he's the son of a Mafia boss and (along with his two older brothers) inherited the turf when his father died -- and he's very aware of it. A good deal of his ruthless Magnificent Bastard persona is a front that he puts up in fear of not being taken seriously in his position (and thus targeted).
 * The main characters of Digimon Savers are all stated to be between 15-18, and are all the SOLE FIELD OFFICERS (at least onscreen) in a "The Men in Black" style operation to prevent Digimon-related disasters in the real world. This would fall neatly into Competence Zone, until you start hearing more about the exploits of Touma/Thomas - at age fifteen, he's already graduated from university and is a fully trained doctor.
 * Pretty much everyone who starts out in Gurren Lagann is less than 20 years old, with Simon and Yoko being around 14 and Kamina at most being 17. The other members are not much older, except for maybe Leeron. How a 14 year old kid managed  is beyond me... and 7 years later, takes on an entire race of beings much stronger than the original opponent. Saving the universe at age 21 shouldn't naturally occur...
 * "Naturally"? Do the impossible, see the invisible... touch the untouchable, break the unbreakable...
 * Pretty much everyone in Naruto is a superhuman fighter when they are just out of their teens. Kakashi is noted to have become a Genin at age 5, a Chunin at age 6 and a Jounin at age 13.
 * Itachi needs a mention here too. ANBU Captain at 13.
 * Deidara joined Akatsuki at around 14.
 * Most examples fall under the general rules of the series, but, apart from Kakashi, Naruto and Sasuke take the cake; At the age of 16, they are among the top 10 fighters in the entire series, and rising fast. (And speaking of fast, Naruto has gone from being held back by his average speed to the fastest man alive.)
 * Killer Bee is at least implied to have become a Chuunin at the age of 5. In which, it probably took less than a year to reach it after graduating the academy, beating out Kakashi and Yamato's records for the youngest Chuunins appointed in the series.
 * In Saiunkoku Monogatari, To Eigetsu not only becomes the youngest person ever to pass the Imperial Examinations and qualify for court office at the age of thirteen, he earns the highest score and is almost immediately appointed co-Governor of an entire province (alongside seventeen-year-old Kou Shuurei). Similarly, by the time he was taken in by the Kou family at the age of fourteen, Seiran had already spent a year infiltrating and destroying a band of criminal mercenaries.
 * Monkey D. Luffy and Roronoa Zoro of One Piece are in an exclusive group of pirates (11 members total) with bounties over 100,000,000. At the ages of 17 and 19, respectively.
 * Nico Robin was forced to become a fugitive at the age of eight, and managed to survive multiple betrayals by the adults who took her in and successfully escaping the marines for 20 years. She is said to have destroyed six Marine ships, but this is actually a lie. Tony Tony Chopper is a fairly skilled doctor at the age of fifteen.
 * Rob Lucci single-handedly killed 500 soldiers who had been taken hostage and took the head of a pirate captain at the age of 13, becoming the youngest member of the elite assassin group CP 9 in the process. The 23-year-old Kaku has been in CP 9 for at least five years, making him 18 or younger at the time of his joining.
 * And then we have the anime OVA Spriggan, whose protagonist appears to be starting high school: he's not only an elite super soldier, he's a hardened, proven veteran who's seen so much action that he's called out of retirement for one last mission by his superiors.
 * Saki Amano in Kanamemo is the chief of a local newspaper office and commands absolute authority (to some extent) over the entire cast. She's in elementary school.
 * Zambot3 demands a mention! Not just were the titular robot's three pilots prepubescant, this was a Kill'Em All series!
 * This also applies to Space Runaway Ideon to an even greater degree!
 * John in Ghost Hunt is an ordained Catholic priest at the age of 19.
 * Naru, who is head of a successful paranormal investigation company at the age of 17, comments on the improbability.
 * However, in Naru's case, this was subverted, as it was revealed that.
 * Son Goku of Dragon Ball. Master martial artist, breaking rocks in one punch that are about the size of his head by his mid-late teens. Goes off on a wild adventure with the 16 year old Bulma at the age of 12. Somewhat justified in that he's a member of a Proud Warrior Race.
 * Ichigo Kurosaki from Bleach managed to become one of the strongest shinigami in the series at age 15 (whereas most of the other shinigami have been training for decades, if not centuries). There's also Toshiro Hitsugaya, who achieved the rank of Captain while having the physical body of a twelve year old and Yachiru, who is a Vice Captain despite looking about seven years old. Of course, these two are older than they look.
 * Hitsugaya is still considered very young in shinigami years, though, hence his status as a prodigy.
 * 2nd Lt. Alice L. Malvin from Pumpkin Scissors. Justified as she's a noble out of officer school (in the prologue). She's still in her teens in the series proper, but younger people have fought in World War One, which the series is a blatant fantasy analogue of.
 * In Katekyo Hitman Reborn, Tsuna, the main character, and several of his classmates and friends are recruited into The Mafia while they are still in middle school. Not to mention, Tsuna is expected become the Tenth boss...
 * Add the Arcobaleno, seven (eight if you count Lal Mirch) infants who are considered to be the strongest fighters in the mafia world.
 * There's also Squalo, who, after defeating the Sword Emperor Tyr, was supposed to take over the Varia, the most feared assassination squad in the Mafia at age 14. The Varia went to Xanxus who was only 2 years older.
 * Muhyo of Muhyo and Roji, officially the youngest executor ever in the MLS, doesn't look older than 10. Biko who's a skilled artificer, looks around the same age.
 * In the anime version of Rockman.EXE, Preteen Genius Enzan Ijuuin is the vice president of IPC, a major computer hardware company. He's also about 12 years old.
 * Deconstructed in Black Lagoon, where  becomes a mafia boss because . The first obstacle once  obtains the title? A war with  The show goes into detail of showing just how strained both the newly minted boss and the mafiosi are about the whole arrangement, and the stress of having to take on all the responsibility.
 * The show also has extremely implausibly young professional assassins Hansel and Gretel. Even given the incredible amounts of Rule of Cool the two operate under (in order to ensure they're not killed two seconds after they're introduced), the show goes into detail showing just how incredibly messed up someone would have to be to have a career like that at that age.
 * Exaggerated and painfully deconstructed in the Detective Conan Non-Serial Movie Phantom of Baker Street. Hiroki Sawada is already a grad student at MIT at the age of... ten, written a commercial genomic genealogy tracker and then an AI system (to which he practically coded himself in). This is not to say, if the Backstory is read correctly, he finished what others would take 15-16 years of schooling in 2 years. Well, the side effect: not only he couldn't play with the other kids, he has to choose not being recognized at all or being kept in work all day... One won't be surprised about what's going on with that.
 * The case of the major character Ai Haibara was also a Deconstruction... and then luckily reconstructed. Her parent worked for the Black Organization and after their accidental death, she was also separated with her sister Akemi as the Organization sent him abroad for education more fit for a Child Prodigy, ending up heading her parent's lab at age of 18 at the latest. Which pretty much deprived her childhood, as she said, not to say that her position and her closeness to Akemi, who became a Red Shirt, provoked a series of events that ended up with her taking the poison she developed-- . This is why she wasn't interested in taking the Antidote herself; she pretty much liked her life (i.e. re-enacting a normal ) as it is now.
 * In Mirai Nikki the two main characters, and their friends, are all 14 years old, and often have to fight for their lives. Yuno in particular has the highest kill count in the series, and is seen as horrific by most fans, at least on some level.
 * In Black Butler, Ciel is the head of the Phantomhive noble family and Funtom company. It does help that his parents were killed, but he is pretty intelligent for someone who is only 12 years old.
 * Probably destined to become a problem for Lupin the Third. He has no definite age, and his series runs on Comic Book Time and Negative Continuity, so you wouldn't think this trope would be an issue. But he is still Lupin The Third, grandson of Arsène Lupin, who was born in 1874. The timeline isn't impossible yet, but every year it becomes a little harder to reconcile Lupin being a young-ish guy with his family history.
 * A Prequel Manga of Sakigake Otokojuku shows that Edajima is specially admitted in the Tokyo Imperial University at the age of eleven, and he passed the test in such a short time, complete with saying the test is far too easy.

Comic Book

 * The Comedian in Alan Moore's Watchmen apparently joined the Minutemen at age 16, having already established a reputation as being particularly brutal and vicious while acting as a vigilante in the city's waterfront area. Clearly a precocious little scamp.
 * Young Tintin can fly planes, drive tanks, operate weaponry, navigate harsh terrain, carve a working trumpet out of a tree branch with a pen-knife, build cars out of discarded spare parts, learn elephant language in a matter of weeks, etc.
 * Derek Dynamo from Super Dinosaur fits this to a 'T'. No more than 13 yet he does battle with powerful Dino Men.

Fanfiction

 * In Time Gate X, an science fiction Land Before Time fan fiction, one of the main characters, Tanner Colvin, is a military scientist who is 14-15 years old.
 * In the legendary satirical fanfic A Trekkie's Tale, the heroine Mary Sue is fifteen and a half years old and a Starfleet lieutenant.
 * Marissa Picard has her beat. She was captain at age 9!
 * The point of the Ore Imo fanfic My Life Can't Lose Its Normality is to make the main character of the series, Kousaka Kyousuke, cooler than he is in canon. It goes about this by having him and several other characters be part of a team of vigilantes who are just as badass as most special operatives, if not more. They're in high school.
 * Over all extremely common in fanfic due to most writers being young and focusing on young heroes.

Film

 * Last Action Hero, where most of the action occurs inside a fictional action-adventure movie, naturally lampshades this when Danny Madigan, a young boy who gets partnered with mature police officer Jack Slater, uses the fact that he is too young for this post to try and persuade Slater that they are inside a movie.
 * Which Slater doesn't find at all weird, especially since their precinct also has a cartoon cat (who's their best cop) and a liquid-metal cyborg (played by Robert Patrick, of course).
 * Similar to Ginga Nagareboshi Gin's "puppy as pack leader" complex, Wolf Quest, the first of the two horrendous Balto sequels, took this to the next level. Not only was Aleu leading an entire wolf pack when she was barely more than a year old, she was only a quarter wolf, and the rest was dog. Not to mention it's highly unlikely that some outsider can just show up and suddenly become Alpha. But of course the only justification for this is that cartoon animals are typically more civilized and accepting than the real thing.
 * The Phantom Menace. Word of God says Queen Amidala was 14 during the events of the film. In the sequel, she's a Galactic Senator at 24 and seems to pass down the trait to her daughter, who held the same position at 19. Anakin and Luke would be examples if they they weren't The Chosen One and his son respectively.
 * This is explained in Darths & Droids; is it a bad thing when the parody makes more sense than the original?
 * Canonically, Jabba the Hutt was improbably young when he first established himself as one of the most prominent crime lords on Tattooine at the age of 80. Although that would be old by human standards, the Hutt age of majority is 100, so it would be the equivalent of a teenager taking over a Mafia crime family.
 * Subverted in the historically accurate John Ford/John Wayne western She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The 1870s cavalry unit depicted is officered primarily by 30 and 40 year old Lieutenants and Captains who were all Majors and Colonels (and even Generals) during the Civil War but had to revert back to their regular army ranks after the war ended. The one young 2nd Lieutenant is told (only half-jokingly) he'll make a good 1st Lieutenant in 10 or 12 years.
 * Spectacularly funny when you consider that the 5 star General Phillip Sheridan in charge of the US Army at the time spent 10 years as a 2nd Lieutenant and moved up in 3 years to 3 star general.
 * The long time in grade was not at all unusual for the US Army during peacetime in this era. Generally promotions only took place when someone farther up died or retired.
 * James Bond rarely falls into this trope, until it nears the end of an actor's tenure (excluding George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton who did three Bond films in total.) It's somewhat disconcerting seeing a 58-year old Roger Moore performing an Unnecessary Combat Roll here and there in A View to a Kill, for example.
 * Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Righteous Kill, which was by most accounts only noteworthy as it was the first movie since Heat to star both actors, and the only one to have them both in more than one scene together. They played Homicide detectives at age 65 and 68 respectively. Not a particularly egregious use of the trope, but it seems more likely that anyone pushing 70 in the NYPD would have a desk job and not be pursuing drug dealers and serial killers, assuming they haven't already retired.
 * The Radio Rock DJs in The Boat That Rocked are on average rather older than most of their real-life Sixties counterparts. Bob in particular is pushing it, but even The Count and Gavin are at least ten years older than they should be.
 * Star Trek XI - Pavel Chekov, the the chief navigator aboard the Federation's flagship is seventeen. He's also apparently an expert in advanced theoretical physics. By the end of the film, Kirk is made Captain at twenty-five. In comparison, his counterpart was the youngest captain in Starfleet at thirty-one.
 * A Criticism of A Bridge Too Far was that Ryan O'Neal,at Thirty-Five,was too young to be believable as an Army General.His real-life Character James Gavin was the same age and was the Youngest General commanding a Division during World War II
 * Rachel Dawes from the rebooted Batman films looks way too young for her prominent position.
 * Inverted in Mystery Team; the characters seem far too young to be kid detectives.
 * After Cain is captured in RoboCop 2, the leadership of the gang is taken over by his prepubescent apprentice. This is somewhat justified in that he threatens to cut off the supply of their designer drug of anyone who doesn't obey him.
 * The titular character in The Librarian movies managed to earn 22 academic degrees (including 4 Ph.D.'s) by the age of 31. In the second film, he meets a female archaeologist about his age who holds 27 degrees.

Literature

 * In Duumvirate, genetically engineered Northberg children become Illuminati at eight. Taking advantage of their inexperience is generally a bad idea.
 * In Hugh Laurie's novel The Gun Seller, the narrator (presumably sarcastically) describes his lawyer as a nine-year old. There's also a twelve-year old banking exec.
 * In the Irish epic Táin bó Cuilange, Cú Chulainn is a magnificent warrior trained in superhuman feats and able to overcome each and every one of Connaught's champion warriors, at about 16-17 years. One opponent calls him out on it, refusing to fight a beardless child. Cu Chulainn runs off to find a goat, trim some of its hair, and make a fake beard for himself to challenge the warrior again.
 * Somewhat subverted in The Dresden Files. Karrin Murphy looks far too young, cute and pretty to be a police lieutenant, but demonstrably isn't as young as she looks.
 * The Archive, named Ivy by Harry, contains all recorded wisdom of humanity. The first time we meet her, she's seven years old.
 * That's not much of an example, since she inherited this from her mother, like every other Archive in history. It's not really her fault, and something of a tragedy, that she received this before she had a chance to have her own life.
 * Robert Jordan loved this and used it constantly in the Wheel of Time, the main character Rand al'Thor becomes the leader of several countries by his early 20s, Mat Cauthon is hailed as one of the greatest military leaders of all time, and Perrin Aybara leads his people in ridding his town of Trollocs and Whitecloaks, and has also become a great military leader, both being born weeks only weeks after Rand. Egwene al'Vere is about 20 and, by the time you meet Tuon, the 20 year old heir of the Seanchan Empire and Magnificent Bastard you're not the least bit shocked.
 * Most of this was justified:
 * Rand delegates almost everything. When he tries to involve himself personally in details of rulership, his inexperience shows and he mostly resorts to bullying anyone who won't fall in line, which only works because.
 * Which is in fact what most of the veterans in rulership actually do. The only difference is that Rand scoff at the "rules", schew the network of favors, rituals and fancy talk and go straight for the yugular. Instead of blackmail, alliances and economic bullying, he simply state "do it or I smite you with your entire state". Needless to say, he is in fact quite the effective ruler.
 * Mat's knowledge of generalship comes from.
 * Egwene's.
 * Tuon was selected by the Empress of Seanchan as the best-qualified of her children after spending her entire life preparing.
 * Even Siuan Sanche was improbably young when she became Amyrlin, around 30 or so in a society where a lifespan of hundreds of years is normal. Justified (a) by being groomed for leadership by a previous Amyrlin because she was one of few witnesses to an important prophesy, and (b) by the chaos of numerous mysterious deaths throughout the Aes Sedai around that time, caused by Black Ajah assassinations, which would have picked off other possible candidates.
 * Used in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell's Mote in God's Eye. The way FTL jumps work affects the nerves of the crew, with older crew taking much longer to recover. So the military is organized such that most ship commanders tend to be mid to late twenties to trade off the youthful ability to function versus the experience issues.
 * Subverted in Honor Harrington. Prolong, especially 3rd generation prolong, retards the growth as well as the aging. So that 14 year old asian girl piloting the ship is really 37 and a lieutenant commander through the military academy. Honor herself is 62 at the current moment in the series, and has finally grown into a early twenties appreciation of her looks.
 * What makes this especially jarring is when her mother (who's about 100 at the time) visits Grayson and has to inform many elderly gentlemen who treat her as a young bimbo that she's older than all of them and a one of the Galaxy foremost genetical experts.
 * Discworld's Tiffany Aching, who defeats the Queen of The Fair Folk and stares down Granny Weatherwax, at the age of nine.
 * Niko Leandros may be Wise Beyond His Years, he may have raised himself to take many levels in badass, with little or no help/schooling whatsoever in his childhood, but it's incredibly implausible to believe that as a four-year-old, he was capable of taking care of a newborn baby.
 * Justified in the short story by Harry Harrison, War With The Robots. The command staff are all teenagers as anyone older lacks the reflexes and flexibility of mind needed to plot strategy in the fast-paced war. They retire after four or five years.
 * In the Horatio Hornblower books, among other Age of Sail books, boys were appointed midshipman as young as twelve. This was a case of Truth in Television...er, history. This actually provides an inversion, though: Horatio became a midshipman at the improbably old age of 17.
 * A justified trope in this case - Midshipmen in the Royal Navy were promoted to Lieutenant on the basis of an exam taken whenever the Captain deemed them ready (but which could not be taken before a certain age). Midshipmen serving on a frigate in the early years of the of the Revolutionary wars would become very competent very quickly, and so it is not so unusual that Hornblower should be quickly promoted.
 * At the end of The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Reveal takes place that . To be fair, she is much weaker than any of the other characters, but still.
 * Virtually every book Tamora Pierce has ever written, though it's most highlighted in the "Circle Opens Quartet" where each of the four protagonists is a fully qualified mage at the age of 14, much to the dismay of 18-year-old trainees who won't get their credentials for another couple of years. Also, the Tricksters Choice/Tricksters Queen books wherein a thirteen-year-old girl becomes queen with the help of her sixteen-year-old spymaster and everyone is perfectly okay with this.
 * While the sixteen year old spymaster is definitely this trope, I wouldn't call the queen it. The raka didn't have a whole lot of choice, since the luarin were cracking down pretty damn hard. It was either Dove or suffering, and since Dove actually listens to her advisors (who except for Aly are reasonably old), I'd say a thirteen year old queen was the lesser of two evils.
 * But it's happened in history that people under the age of 18 have become king/queen due to the previous king/queen/heirs dying, while they were still underage, and so have had people who rule for them (Queen Consorts, or other Lords who can't rule). As for the Emelan Four who get their mage credentials, they all started off with a lot of innate magic to begin with, all of the kind that is normally more powerful, because it draws off the power of things themselves, and due to a lot of hectic events far out of their control, their magic got mixed together, which also magnified their base power. That, and they were given their credentials to make them more accountable for their actions to the mage councils, rather than risking having underage kids running around with lots of power, and they are only allowed to show their medallions when necessary. So, there are in-verse reasons for it, but, still a little young (but 5-10 years, max).
 * In Ender's Game, Ender Wiggin's older brother basically becomes President of Earth at age 13, due to his online debating skills.
 * In the subsequent Shadow series, Card puts his age nearing his twenties. Peter (Ender's Brother)is only elected due to multiple countries seeing him as the least amount of threat to their soveriegnities, and the decentralization of the power of the office. He also defuses a war, and calls several countries out with controversial information on their activities.
 * There's also Ender and every kid at the Battle School. Ender destroys an entire alien race by the age of 9 or so, and then shortly after, he writes a book and starts a new religion. Not bad for someone who hasn't hit puberty yet. This trope is also basically the whole point of the Battle School. Valentine Wiggin is also instrumental in Peter's rise as Hegemon, and at the age of around 11, she becomes a powerful demagogue who directly influences current events and shortly after, becomes a very influential historian. And then you have Qing Jao Xenocide, who is the sole person to discover Jane's existence, and she's only around 18 or so, with Wang Mu, her even younger assistant, who's just as brilliant, if not moreso (those two are justified in that they're genetically modified to be super intelligent, though). And we haven't even mentioned Bean yet. In fact, the entirety of the Ender's Game series is BUILT on this trope.
 * Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest uses it in universe: Prince Rupert's extreme youth for his military accomplishments is commented on by his captor.
 * Jules Verne lesser-known novel Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen, which is rather self-explanatory.
 * Deconstructed (what else?) in A Song of Ice and Fire: assuming adult responsibilities at ridiculously young ages is one of the many, many reasons why the entire cast is Royally Screwed-Up.
 * This is pretty much the premise of Harry Potter.

Live Action TV

 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All potential slayers are between the ages of about 15 and 18 when, or if, they are activated.
 * Willow becomes the most powerful person on the entire planet at the age of 21 (after only learning magic was real at 16), and in the season 8 comics Buffy is one of the leaders of the Slayer Organization at 23, Xander, who is mission control is also 23, and Dawn is 18. These people could take over the world if they wanted to.
 * Angel has an example, though one that people will only notice in a Fridge Logic type of way. The gang rescued Fred from Pylea where she had supposedly been stuck there for five years. She was a pretty girl in her mid-20s. Yet she was also said to be a very accomplished grad student before being sent there. At the age she was sent there, she could've been only a college junior at best.
 * The Dollhouse is filled with people who are far too young and pretty to actually be masters of the jobs they are sent on. Strangely, no one ever calls them out on this.
 * Well, except in the very first episode, where everyone comments on the fact that Echo is far too young and pretty to be a competent hostage negotiator. Eventually contributing to her partial breakdown.
 * Not to mention Topher, who supposedly is one of the world's best experts on neurotechnology when visibly he is at most in his late 20s. This put him actually as too young to be even a normal neurosurgeon, which requires four years of college, four years of med school and seven years of residency to achieve. Yet somehow Topher manages this super-secret and revolutionary technology despite being a guy who could only be a few years out of grad school at best.
 * Routinely occurs in Crime and Punishment Series, particularly with replacement characters, where detectives and officers often seem far too young to have achieved their rank. It's common among not-quite-main protagonists, and particularly blatant in the case of female bosses, who are are routinely played by actresses in their late twenties and early thirties. Most often, they look like, well, actresses, thin, pretty, fragile, well made up and well dressed.
 * Compare this to the bosses in Law and Order (S. Epatha Merkerson) and Law and Order Special Victims Unit (Dann Florek), both of whom are obviously middle-aged and carrying the gravitas of people who have seen it all in their decades of service.
 * Lampshaded in Law and Order when Milena Govich joined the cast. Cassaday's youth and looks made it difficult for her to get taken seriously by anyone and caused people to suspect she only made detective as a PR stunt by the department.
 * In the last seasons of Stargate SG-1 Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell's in-show age (younger than the actor's real age) is so low that in order to be a lieutenant colonel he would have to have received almost all of his ranks shortly after the legal mandated minimum time between ranks.
 * It is implied he was promoted to Lt. Col. because of his action in Antarctica.
 * And the SGC looks to recruit the best and brightest, so if there really was someone so good as to get all his promotions all the way up to Lt. Colonel in the legal minimum time, it would come as no surprise that he'd work at the SGC.
 * Called out in Stargate Atlantis with Doctor Keller, especially in the Episode Vegas where she replaced a coroner and there's no way she should be old enough.
 * See also Charmed (especially the early seasons), where 20-something Prue is an expert antiquities appraiser and her younger sister, Piper, is a gourmet chef/nightclub owner. The youngest, Phoebe, was originally something of a slacker, but she eventually became a star advice columnist with a major San Francisco newspaper. Phoebe then became romantically involved with the owner of the paper (who was, of course, about 30), with access to his private jet for romantic getaways to Hong Kong.
 * Ridiculous example: Brooke from One Tree Hill went from relatively unremarkable teenager who had just graduated high school with a starting fashion line to an internationally famous multi-millionairess owner of a fashion company, magazine and television channel in under four years thanks to a Time Skip between seasons 4 and 5. True it is later revealed that Brooke's mother is the business brains behind the empire, but the fact that Brooke personally became so famous and that her designs were so successful so quickly stretches credibility beyond breaking point.
 * Another ridiculous, fashion-related example: Jenny Humphrey of Gossip Girl. Somehow, some way, at age fifteen, she's a mini-couturier, able to rival nearly all of New York Fashion Week's regular fixtures.
 * As of mid-season two, Chuck Bass fits this trope. The guy took over his father's company at age seventeen, albeit briefly. As of season three he runs his own hotel, hosts political election parties and has a grand opening of his new club... and the guy has only just turned eighteen. The club opening episode revolved a lot around acquiring a liquor license, yet the fact that the club owner was not legally allowed to purchase alcohol was never brought up.
 * Dr. Spencer Reid on Criminal Minds: Three PhD's, FBI profiler, turns 24 in the show's first season. Needless to say, he has a hard time getting taken seriously by people who don't know him very well (which fact he has been known to turn to his own advantage).
 * It's made clear that he's been brilliant his whole life, which can shave decades off schooling.
 * He did graduate high school at age 12...
 * The writers of the show think "Ph.D" and "doctorate" are interchangable terms, though, as Reid is said to have earned several "Ph.Ds" before the first season, which is to say, by the time he was 23, at the oldest. Unless his years have more days than other people's, it isn't possible, because Ph.Ds require original research projects, and written dissertations, which must be defended before committees, and each one requires coursework, which no university is going to schedule just for one student's convenience, and which must be done before the research project is begun. I don't care how brilliant someone is, you can't make plants grow faster, or rats learn the mazes faster, and there is a physical limit to how long it takes someone to type 300 pages, not to mention a committee of several people each to read those pages. Maybe he has more than one doctorate, an advanced degree that does not require a dissertation, but he does not have multiple Ph.Ds.
 * Many characters on Bones have this problem. Most of the scientists are in their mid-thirties and yet have been at the Jeffersonian for at least four years, have more than two degrees, and a high amount of volunteer work in other countries. One character has several psychology degrees, was a Rhodes Scholar, is an experienced FBI profiler and has time for video games. He's 23. It is a bit unrealistic, even for geniuses.
 * Ironically Brennan's level of education appears to be a toned down version of what Kathy Reichs had done by that age.
 * The "ducklings" on House. Given that Cameron and Chase are both stated as 26 in season one and Foreman is 30, they're a bunch of medical prodigies alright. Cameron, an immunologist, would have had to graduate high school roughly at age 14. Foreman, the neurologist, could have gotten that far in his career by 30, but he's also shown as being a neurosurgeon meaning he also would have graduated high school early. Chase is the one who stands out the most though, since aside from being a Trauma specialist and having some form of expertise in pediatrics (meaning he would have graduated high school around age 13) he also spent a few years in seminary training, back when he wanted to be a priest. He must have graduated high school around age 10. However in season two he is aged up to 30.
 * Then add the fact that all three of them have had enough training to not only be capable of performing every medical test known to man, they are also qualified to do them. They must have all graduated high school in the womb.
 * The whole point of Joe 90. A child secret agent was thought to be less conspicuous than an adult one, and every week his scientist father would add knowledge into his mind that were only accessible when Joe wore glasses.
 * Thomas Oliver from Power Rangers. Between the years of 1997 (when he graduated high school) and 2004, he managed to have a sucessful career as a professional racecar driver, go through college, get a doctorate in paleontology, become a mad scientist and create several varieties of incredibly advanced cyborg dinosaur thingies, and become a licensed teacher. Makes you feel like you've already wasted your life, doesn't it.
 * The teaching certificate really isn't all that hard to get, especially if you already have a doctorate.
 * He was back by and worked with Anton Mercer(a millonaire scientist) on the robotic dinos,but even that should eat up more time than the other sucesses put together.
 * There is a bit of fridge here though, when you spend 4 years fighting monsters in a robot dino, driving ginat cars, and teams with boy genius Billy Cranston some of that is going to rub off. You want ridiculous though take Justin who (with the help of alpha) built 5 perfect robot clones of the team, then again...Alpha.
 * With Power Rangers RPM, we have Dr K who is that seasons mentor, is no older than 19 and has been doing complex mathematical equations since she was 5.
 * Granted she wasn't even alow to see the sun when she was 5 locked up in the Ultimate Training From Hell where the entire crux of her arc rests on "i just want to see the sun" and "i wish i could rememeber my own name"
 * Ethan Rom, the only surgeon the Others had and apparently a very good one, was 27 when he died. Daniel Faraday is a tenured professor at Oxford when at the earliest he had to be born in 1977 and was probably born in 1978, but it is justified by him being explicitly said to be the youngest graduate in Oxford's history (meaning he graduated when he was 13 or less) and he screws up rather badly when he's a professor,.
 * Boone is mentioned as running a part of a large business despite being only twenty-two or so (Ian Somerhalder was twenty-five when the show started). However He explicitly states that his mother is head of the company and it is quite obvious that he did not earn it through experience.
 * In the college years of Saved by the Bell, Kelly has a brief fling with her professor while she's nineteen. It's explicitly mentioned that he's 32. Now, it's possible to get a Ph.D. and be a professor by that age, but it's also stated that he has two published books, and an appearance on Good Morning America. Also, he somehow found time to get married, have a child, and get divorced. Borderline possible, but highly unlikely. Interestingly, the actor was in his late 20's at the time, so they were aware of the age issue and tried to fix it somewhat.
 * That's not improbable at all considering that there's no requirement that you do all of that sequentially. Most of the things on the list wouldn't have taken that much time to accomplish anyway - You can get married in Vegas in a day, write a book in under a year and have a kid at the same time, and tv appearances rarely last more than a few hours.
 * The premise of Doogie Howser, M.D. revolves around a sixteen-year-old doctor.
 * Jarod of The Pretender was a boy-genius who was kidnapped by an Evil Corporation at age four and exploited for his intelligence for over twenty years. He was designing airplanes, engineering buildings, and helping catch serial killers by about the age of twelve and developed a method for human cloning in his late teens.
 * Daisy's employment agency boss in series 2 of Spaced seems about 12 years old. This isn't commented on in-show beyond Daisy's incredulous looks, but fits the ongoing theme that Tim and Daisy are starting to feel a little old as they approach their late twenties.
 * In a rare case of characters being implausibly old for their positions the characters that start as interns in the first episode of Grey's Anatomy are nearly all a little on the mature side. A normal intern would be roughly 26 years old but except for Katherine Heigl the other actors were 7-10 years older.
 * Star Trek: The Next Generation has Sela, a (half-)Romulan commander who has been seen leading two very important operations with potentially galaxy-wide consequences at the ripe old age of 22. This becomes even more unbelievable when you consider that Romulans have about twice the lifespan of humans, making her roughly the equivalent of an 11-year old general.
 * In the Star Trek Armada game, which doesn't take place much later than the series, she has made admiral.
 * A mild case happens in The X-Files. Scully's birthdate is in 1964, which makes her 28 at the start of the series (since the date given for the pilot is March of 1992, though it aired in 1993). She's introduced as a medical doctor with a specialty in foresic pathlogy, and she teaches at the FBI Academy. On top of that, it's mentioned that she had already put in two years at the FBI. This seems highly unrealistic, because becoming a forensic pathologist in the US requires a person to graduate medical school with an MD, then a 3-5 year residency specializing in anatomic pathology, then a 1 year forensic pathology fellowship. That's at least 13 years of education. Add on the two years Scully is supposed to have been at the FBI, and that's 15 years at the start of the series. She should be in her early to mid-30's, not her late 20's.
 * Not to mention the Ph.D. you usually need to teach at college-level and beyond. However, that may work differently for the FBI Academy.
 * Ziva David from NCIS is less Improbable Age and more Impossible Age. She joins the show in her early twenties, supposedly after she's graduated high school, served her two years in the IDF, attended college, applied for Mossad, become immediately tapped for inclusion into an elite and highly competitive special operations unit with a training period of several years, and still have enough time to become "an experienced agent" with multiple missions under her belt. And this is at a age the youngest CIA intelligence officers would be beginning training.
 * In a less obvious and less egregious case from NCIS: If you pay attention to the various backstory tidbits dropped for Tony along with his stated age (a little younger than his actor), it works out that he made detective at around age twenty-eight and this is after he most likely got a Masters. In context he must be a law-enforcement prodigy- though that does fit in with his characterisation some of the time.

Music
"I am the captain and I have been told
 * Dar Williams's "We Learned The Sea". I may be misinterpreting it, but it sounds as though it features a skillful and stoic ship's captain who's A Mother To Her Men. She's also, apparently, eight years old, and addresses a crewmember who's even younger:

But I am not shaken, I am eight years old

And you are still young, but you'll understand

That the stars of the sea are the same for the land"


 * At seven years old, Rachel Trachtenberg was playing the drums for her family's band: The Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players. She later learned bass guitar. By the time she turned 17 in 2011, they had released two albums, she had released two albums of her own (one solo and one with a separate band), and now produces a TV and radio show.

Tabletop Games

 * Dungeons and Dragons, among other games, has characters' starting ages at the time of adulthood for their race; considering that adventures may not take very long in-game, this can make for such improbabilities as a young man beginning his martial training at 18 and slaying dragons single-handed before he's 20.
 * Averted in AD&D1, at least, where magic-users were at least 20 or so, and could be as old as their 30s before beginning their adventuring career.

Video Games
""I'm Captain Threepwood! I've been to Monkey Island four times, defeated the evil pirate Lechuck repeatedly, I uncovered the gates of hell, I destroyed an autralian land developer and his Ultimate Insult, discovered the world's only talking monkey, and married the most beautiful governer in the world...and all before the age of 22!""
 * Commander Miranda Keyes in Halo 2 and 3, although this is handwaved with the explanation that many high-ranked military people have been killed during the Human-Covenant War and had to be replaced.
 * Is it just coincidence that her father died a hero?
 * The way that war was going? Not really.
 * In Halo 2, she's only commanding a troop-carrying corvette or frigate (just look at its positively miniscule size compared to Covenant ships of the line), the equivalent of a modern-day Marine amphibious helicopter carrier. Which would be a reasonable position for a person of her rank and age. In Halo 3, she's one of the most senior officers in the UNSC navy by virtue of being one of the only surviving officers in the UNSC navy, the Covenant Loyalist faction having almost entirely destroyed the fleet and the planet Earth.
 * The Spartans are also like this. Master Chief was fourteen when he fought his first real battle. The SPARTAN-IIIs in Beta Company were twelve when they fought  on Pegasi Delta.
 * Tales of the Abyss plays this straight and subverts it. Van Grants looks a lot older than 27, and yet he's the head of the Oracle Knights because he's just that good at what he does. He got a lot of flak for it when he was first promoted, and so he grew a beard to make people think he was older than he really was. Subverted with Jade Curtiss, who was capable of Fonic Artes (ie: magic) that would take an adult decades to fully master at a young age and was adopted into a military family who noticed his talents, but despite this he's never stepped beyond Colonel (he's 35 at the time of the story). Dismotivation is implied to have a role in this.
 * Many have commented that every main character in the Resident Evil series is about ten years too young for the palette of skills at their disposal. Chris Redfield is an ex-Air Force fighter pilot and member of a crack police unit at 25. Jill Valentine is ex-Delta Force (a unit which does not admit women) at 23.
 * In No More Heroes, Henry and Sylvia were  Since Henry is
 * Actually, this could be a case of Reality Is Unrealistic. The games never say that they in America.  Given that Henry is Irish, it's entirely possible that it happened when he was in college there.
 * In the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney games, only three of the attorneys that appear in the first two games appear to be out of their twenties: Winston Payne, Marvin Grossberg, and Manfred von Karma. Of course, considering all the other idiosyncrasies of the justice system as presented in the games, ridiculously young attorneys are pretty much par for the course. In some places it's possible to be a lawyer without going through grad school, but really, it's all just handwaved.
 * Godot's age on his profile in-game simply says ??.
 * Phoenix had passed his bar exam by the time he was 24.
 * Mia Fey passed her bar exam by the time she was 23, and had her own law office by the time she was 27.
 * Franziska von Karma became a lawyer at only 13. They kind of explain it as being a result of her being born and raised in Germany, that land of remarkably progressive laws and very easy bar exams.
 * Calisto Yew was 23 when Edgeworth met her, and she'd been practicing law for at least a couple of years.
 * Apollo Justice himself is even younger than Phoenix when he becomes a lawyer (22). At his age, he should be finishing college or just starting law school! And then you have Adrian Andrews, a 23 year old manager, Ron DeLite a 22 year old Chief of Security...let's face it, the Ace Attorney series hates old people. And by "old", we mean older than 27.
 * Well, kind of. The oldest character in the series is Quercus Alba, who's 72.
 * Klavier Gavin (also German) was a rockstar AND a lawyer at 17.
 * Kristoph Gavin (also also German) was a well established defense attorney by 25.
 * Miles Edgeworth (partially raised in Germany) had his court debut at 20.
 * While her official age is never given, Lynne was a young girl ten years before the events of Ghost Trick and now she's a full-fledged detective. The only real explanation we get is that Cabanela took her under his wing, so he might have made the department take in a younger detective than usual.
 * The Final Fantasy Series in general. Some examples include:
 * SeeD from Final Fantasy VIII fits this trope, with all of its members being special forces certified mercenaries before hitting age 20. Quistis in particular is notable, as she's not only a SeeD but a SeeD instructor (the license for which she got when she was 15) despite being only 18, just one year older than most of the other party members. On the other hand, the Garden that trains the SeeDs starts accepting students at the age of five, and Quistis started training at around twelve...
 * Halfway through the game, Squall Leonhart becomes Commander of the entirety of SeeD at the age of seventeen, Justified Trope by the fact that not only is he the SeeD with the most complete understanding of the current crisis, he's also . Squall's not remotely happy about it.
 * Cecil Harvey of Final Fantasy IV and Terra Branford of Final Fantasy VI aren't exactly kids. Nor are the heroes of Final Fantasy II, or the original Light Warriors. Actually, one of the old games has this trope with a vengeance - the four heroes of Final Fantasy III are explicitly stated to be children, indeed orphans.
 * Celes from Final Fantasy VI is an 18-year-old army general working for The Empire who burned down a resisting village shortly before the events of the game. And apparently she's taken time off from soldier training to learn how to sing in an opera.
 * They aren't children or teenagers, but at the start of Final Fantasy IV, Cecil and Kain are only 20 and 21; they are also jaded soldiers and the Baronian military system's equivalent of generals. They were at least trained from birth to be soldiers.
 * Even if Baron have somehow found a way to teach five years old how to wield a sword and fight, without sacrificing other essential things like formal education, mental growth and own sanity, they still have to find a way into turning 20 years olds into generals. Leading an army doesn't consist of swinging a sword, it consists of planning the troops, raising their morale, knowing hos the soldiers works, ect ect, something you can't teach teenagers, as it mostly deals with experience in the army, something a 20 year old lacks.
 * True, but remember, they've been trained since birth at the discretion of the KING. Given that Cecil seems to have been informally adopted by the King and Kain's father was both a friend to and loyal retainer of the King, early promotons would be expected, and they're more similar to captains then generals in terms of rank. Cecil is even referred to as "Lord Captain."
 * It's kind of ridiculous in Dissidia Final Fantasy, where they put all the heroes from the first ten games together and the oldest character ends up being 21! Which makes it particularly odd to see 17-year-old Squall acting as Team Mom to Bartz and Zidane, when Bartz is older than Squall and Zidane is only a year or two behind him at most.
 * The youngest of them all is cute little Onion Knight. People who think he's Luneth generally have him at 15, while people who think he's one of the Onion Kids from the original FF 3 tend to estimate around the ripe old age of 12.
 * In Final Fantasy VII, both Zack and Cloud join the Shinra military when they're about 14 years old, which appears to be accepted as normal. Zack becomes a hotshot SOLDIER First Class at age 17, while veteran uber-SOLDIERs Sephiroth, Angeal, and Genesis are all only in their early twenties during the majority of the events in Crisis Core.
 * In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy Tactics A2, the protagonist are school kids, while the people who's in combat in Ivalice are older than them.
 * Somewhat justified in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance - by reading the magic book, the kids, especially all played a part in creating the world of Ivalice by making it like a Final Fantasy game they all played, so it wouldn't be surprising that they are all able to participate in the game/world at their current ages, since they would be the protagonists. And   has , so he would probably be a borderline Physical God in Ivalice. Besides, everyone aside from Cid and   has a Vague Age anyway.
 * Top of the list has to be Eiko from Final Fantasy IX - she's only six years old.
 * Zidane and Garnet are both 16 and Freya is 21. If you weren't told this, you would never know it. They act much older, and have histories and experiences that imply they can't be that young, for example Freya being a member of the Dragon Knights several years ago and Zidane having years of experience as a thief.  Vivi is also 9, but, given in-story justifications, that's not really an improbable age.
 * Final Fantasy XII has Vaan and Penelo (both 17) and Larsa, age 12. On the other hand, Basch is 36 and Fran is at least 50.
 * Dragon Quest V starts off the protagonist as six years old. He gets treated as such, and it shows in other things such as being unable to read signs, but this obviously does not stop him from donning Plate Armor and wielding a Broadsword to considerable effect.
 * Though never outright specified, many of the commanding officers in the Advance Wars series look like kids, or teenagers at best. Fittingly, the series treats war more like a game than an armed struggle.
 * Days of Ruin/Dark Conflict mostly averts this trope and justifies the few cases that come along: Will/Ed is a trained army cadet and is forced into a leadership position because the troops respect him more than they do Lin, while Penny/Lili, Tabitha/Larissa and are all tyke bombs designed to be army commanders.
 * Semi-averted in most Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games. As the setting is based on medieval Europe humans are officially considered adults at fifteen and are generally treated appropriately. The protagonist of Baldur's Gate is canonically stated to be twenty (even if he or she is part of a long-lived species such as an elf where a 20-year old would still be a child), and the protagonists of other games, such as Neverwinter Nights, are generally also twenty or equivalent for non-humans.
 * It's played straight a couple of times, the most notable being in the Throne of Bhaal expansion for Baldur's Gate 2 where one of the villains is a dragon who's the same age as the main character, who's about 22-25 at that point. A dragon that age should be about 4 feet long and barely able to speak in full sentences, but that dragon is as large and powerful as some of the 1000 year old dragons you fight at other parts of the game.
 * Knights of the Old Republic. In the second game, 23-year-old Mira chides the male Exile for hitting on her and being too old.
 * Bastila's Battle Meditation is the central power responsible for the Republic's ability to battle the Sith, but the most liberal estimates of her age place her in her early twenties. She is, however, the only Jedi alive with her ability. The game acknowledges her age in several ways: she's still a padawan and there are repeated comments to the effect that in peacetime they wouldn't let her outside the enclave without a Master to watch her back. Plus her other abilities kinda suck becuase her training emphasised her unique abilities ahead of combat skills.
 * Averted in the second game in the series: Mira, the youngest member of the party, is commonly estimated to be around twenty. The Exile (the player) is a war hero[ine], and is generally agreed to be in his/her late thirties or early forties.
 * Chris Avellone puts the ages of Visas, the Disciple and the Handmaiden at 25, and Mira at 23. Considering all the highly accomplished young people out there, the Star Wars universe must have a brutal learning curve.
 * Sienna In Phantom Brave was  30 years ago. She doesn't look a day over 27.
 * She probably was 13, but her sprite still doesn't look 43.
 * Given that Super Robot Wars Original Generation is one huge homage to Giant Robot anime, they love this trope. By Original Generation Gaiden both the Ship captains are in their late 20's, the platoon leaders are in their mid 20's at most, and there are 14 year old mecha pilots running all over the place. Ironically the 14 year old mecha pilots are the only ones justified.
 * Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater deliberately goes the opposite direction with 100+ year old sniper "The End." In one of the series famous No Fourth Wall tricks, you can cause him to die of old age by adjusting your system clock.
 * All of the Cobras are an inversion, if they were in their twenties and thirties during the war, then they would have to be in their forties and fifties during the game. Of course, it's implied that the Boss formed the Cobras when she was 16... (Which has even creepier connotations when you consider her relationship with the sorrow)
 * And then there's Ocelot, who was a GRU major at 20. Then again, he was, which makes it a bit more believable. And either way, this seems perfectly normal compared to most of the other examples on this page.
 * This is either lampshaded, justified, or just discussed in a radio conversation at one point. Apparently it has something to do with his parents, as well.
 * Yes because his parents are infact
 * The Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors games take this to a new level. Both games would feature one or two Loli characters, with Improbable Weapons to boot, and still have them go into battle fought by men in their thirties (The Two Qiaos, Oichi in Samurai Warriors 1 and Gracia, I'm looking at you all.)
 * In Eternal Sonata, one of the regular party members is Beat, a street kid who is...wait for it...only eight years old. He seems to have little problem shooting and mercilessly beating enemies, but once expressed worry that he would wet his pants in fear while crossing a high bridge.
 * Link from the The Legend of Zelda series is already a master of multiple weapons, including bows, bombs, boomerangs, and swordplay, as well as a few magic spells in some games, but then you take into account that in most games he's no older than 12 years old.
 * Both subverted in Castlevania Aria of Sorrow, where Julius Belmont is over fifty years old and still a force to be reckoned with, and played straight, as he was 19 by the time he killed Dracula.
 * The 19 years old thing is not unusual for the Belmont clan, considering Richter did it, and most Belmonts are only a few years older at most. If anything, Juste was YOUNGER, at 18. Julius is notable for being fifty years old by the time of the Sorrow titles, and yet still being able to kick ludicrious amounts of ass, impressive for a guy who hasn't been working out for three decades. Consider, each generation of the Belmont clan is stronger than the last. Besides Reinhardt Schneider, the last full-blood Belmont was Ritcher, and that was 202 years before Julius went into action in 1999. Think about it.
 * In the SSX games, many of the competitors are just teenagers, with Kaori Nishidake at only 17 in SSX 3... but Griff Simmons takes the cake by only being eleven years old. To be fair, this seems slightly less unlikely when you realize he was based on Ryan Sheckler, who won gold at the X-Games in real life when he was only 14.
 * In the May-be Soft comedy Visual Novel Patvessel, Hikari, a hopeless 18-year old Genki Girl, is installed as the captain of a city patrolling(...) fully functional battleship because her father is the chief of police. At her age, much less her level of experience, she really shouldn't be doing that.
 * In Fallout 1 and 2, it's possible for your character to start out at as young as 16 (you can select your age to start; it affects pretty much nothing). Considering that all the screwing, murdering, and driving the character can do, they probably figured sixteen was the absolute youngest they could go.
 * Considering its a post-apocalyptic setting where no one would probably care about things like mandatory education, minimal age for drinking, driving, weapon-handling, etc. because you need to learn how to survive, it's kind of justified.
 * In Fallout 3, your character is 19 years old but your initial skills are explained by things like your father giving you a BB gun when you're 10, having to deal with a gang of bullies, your father teaching you medical skills, etc. Also, like above you're in a lawless wasteland, so the drugs and such make sense.
 * Lampshaded in Escape from Monkey Island:


 * In Kingdom Hearts, the characters start at 14 or 15, but look even younger. They save worlds. Plural.
 * Ciel from Mega Man Zero is a human who is leading the Reploid La Résistance at the age of 14, after she built Copy X, a near perfect replica of one of the (if not the) most powerful and advanced AIs in the world, at the age of 6. She may be a gene-boosted human, but that's still impressive.
 * Grandia's protagonist, Justin, is 14 his best friend Sue is 8 and the experienced adventurer Feena is 16. Despite their age they can pretty much defeat anything opposing with no sweat. There's also the Garlyle Forces which has many officer positions held by 16 year old girls.
 * Prototype's Director McMullen had his doctorate in genetics at age 20, and founded Gentek the following year. However, while he could have been a prodigy, his age is only mentioned once in the Jigsaw Puzzle Plot, so it's entirely possible that the writers simply screwed up the math on his birth date, and the editors neglected to call them on it.
 * Mass Effect: Tali is 22 in the first game, but this is justified as her being a technological savant amongst a race of technological savants, as well as her father being a member of the Admiralty Board, a group of five people that guides their entire civilisation. It does get out of hand in the third game when, though.
 * On the other hand, she's 26 or so by the time she's, and she doesn't think she's really qualified.
 * Lampshaded in the Korean MMO driving game Drift City. One of the people who dishes out missions is obviously a kid. "How old am I? Don't ask me that!"
 * Certainly Pokémon is famous for this, given that you generally take down a criminal syndicate as a ten year old, but they continue it in Gen. IV with Cyrus. He's the Big Bad of the Sinnoh region, has a legion of minions, uncovered legends and science that show how to ascend to godhood, solves one of the biggest questions the fanbase had had (see his report about Poke Balls hampering power), has made more money than he knows what to do with, and did I mention he's stated directly to be twenty-seven years old? And it gets better--an agent comments that they haven't gotten a promotion in five years. Barring an unspoken previous leader, Cyrus had the team up and running by the time he was TWENTY-TWO. Although there's an in-game reason given for this: he was pressured from a young age to be perfect, and it's said to have caused his mental breakdown. Think about that next time you battle fourteen-year-old Red,.
 * The spinoff Pokémon Plus Nobunagas Ambition actually lampshades this, Mori Motonari mentions the protagonist is much younger than he expected, and starts to wonder whether he's the old guard on his way out. (Judging by his looks, he's in his twenties at the very most)
 * Fire Emblem has done this, sometimes even lampshading it. In Path of Radiance, for example, Ike protests that he's too inexperienced to lead a mission. Then there's the Empress of Begnion
 * The entire primary casts of the first and second Lunar games (Lucia excepted) are all in their teens. In Silver Star, Alex and Luna are 15, Mia and Nash are 16, Jessica is 17, and Kyle is 18; in Eternal Blue, Hiro and Lemina (and NPC Mauri) are 16, Jean is 18, and Leo and Ronfar are 19. Their ages have not stopped Kyle from becoming leader of a group of thieves, Mia carrying rather a lot of responsibility for ensuring the smooth running of the Vane academy, and Leo and Mauri bearing the titles of White Dragon Knight and Red Dragon Priestess respectively.
 * In Elder Scrolls IV, at character creation you have an age slider that can make your character appear as young as your mid to late teens. The slider is purely cosmetic, meaning you can go on to  without anyone mentioning that you're practically a child.
 * Barring Robotnik, an old man, and Shadow, who was in stasis for a few decades, the characters in the Sonic the Hedgehog games are almost all in their mid-to-late teens, and a few are even younger. In fact, assume they're around 15 if you don't see them here: Charmy and Cream (6), Marine (7), Tails (8), Amy (12), Rouge and Big (18), Vector (20), and Vanilla (unknown, mother of Cream). And almost every last one of these guys has contributed to saving the world at least twice, with the exception of Marine, who only showed up in Sonic Rush Adventure, and Vanilla, who doesn't really do much.
 * Especially Tails, who has been absent from a grand total of two games since his first appearance.
 * In Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, the last chapter likely ends up with your character being the leader of a faction fighting for control of a country at age 17-18. Now it does make a little more sense in the context of the plot and what has led up to there, but still try imagining such a thing.
 * Sakura Wars V has Cheiron/Sagitta, who is a 21 year old lawyer. (She's also black in the year 1928.)
 * Rosita is an actor and bounty hunter at age 11.
 * Most of the plot-important doctors in Trauma Center are considered the best surgeons in their fields and are anywhere from in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties.
 * Laharl, the ruler of the netherworld from Disgaea may be Really Seven Hundred Years Old, but he is mentally and physically around 13. Likewise, Jennifer built Thursday at the age of 10, and Fuka from the fourth game wanted to Take Over the World (Of course!) at the age of five! This is probably meant to be a parody of the concept, just like everything else.
 * Admiral Mikey, a character General Knoxx refers to several times in Borderlands: The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, is the admiral of the Crimson Lance 3rd Starborne Brigade. He's also five. Unlike other characters in this list who are usually Wise Beyond Their Years, Mikey is simply a five-year-old boy appointed to the rank of admiral because of unchecked nepotism. Played for Laughs, like damn near everything else in the game.
 * 'Goddamn Nepotism'
 * Fighters in Arcana Heart range in age from 5 to 16 (ignoring the robot), with most girls being around age 14. Two characters deserve special mention: Catherine Kyoubashi and Kira Daidouji are both on the younger side (12 and 11, respectively), and each holds a doctorate from a prestigious university. Kira, in particular, is considered a pioneer in her field; the fact that she's not exempt from mandatory elementary school in Japan after earning a doctorate in America is what pushes her toward World Domination.

Web Original
"Katy: How can you even have all these skills? You're what, thirteen years old? That's not nearly enough time to learn all this. Just who are you?"
 * Führer Katrina Seran from v2 to v4 of Open Blue achieved the equivalent rank of Fleet Admiral in the Seranni Navy at the age of 20, and became ruler of her country a month later when her father, the Kaiser, "mysteriously" died. It helps that she's quite the Evil Genius.
 * Another qualifier is Rhianna von Adolph, the equivalent of a Colonel and leader of the special forces division of Seran's intelligence agency at the age of 26.
 * A third is Elysia Schneider from v2, a Vice Admiral at the age of 27. Her Backstory furthermore indicates that she has held this rank for a few years now. Apparently, being one of the Führer's classmates is a surefire way to end up with a lofty position within the Reich.
 * Harry (and by extension, the rest of the student characters) in A Very Potter Musical claims to be "just a twelve-year-old kid," despite the rather mature romantic subplots and advanced spellwork present in the musical. This is played for humor.
 * In ''Caretaker: Reborn, the title character is only fifteen. Despite this, he's still skilled enough to qualify as both Badass Normal and Weak but Skilled. Katy lampshades this in the third chapter:


 * Jeremiah Arkham in The Joker Blogs looks too young to have even finished medical school, let alone be married and running his family's asylum.
 * Chaz of Phantasy Star IV begins the game a fully-fledged hunter at sixteen and (except for Rika, who is one year old, being a genetically engineered Numan) the youngest member to join the party. Gryz is a hardened warrior at eighteen, and Kyra is a mysterious, powerful, and famous Esper at nineteen. Although the game says his age is unknown, for comparison's sake, Rune is twenty-four.

Western Animation

 * Again, Tintin but maybe he's an incredibly well preserved runt ...
 * In the non-canonical novel, he has a genetic condition that keeps him as an early teen. When he considers the complexities of adult life, he considers this a blessing.
 * He-Man and the Masters of the Universe featured Teela as the captain of the royal guard at age 16.
 * Danny Phantom where 14-year-old Tucker becomes  in the Grand Finale. Plenty of "Whaaaa--?!" reactions were commonplace among the fandom.
 * Phineas and Ferb invokes this trope in the name of comedy. Whenever someone asks the two titular characters Once an Episode whether they're too young to be doing whatever absurdly ambitious project they have planned this time, Phineas responds with a deadpan "Yes. Yes we are." Hey, Refuge in Audacity works.
 * Except of course in the episode where they became pop stars... in that instance, no, they weren't too young for it.
 * Lampshaded in one episode, where one of the delivery guys apologizes for the other delivery guy asking the question and states that the guy who asked is new to the job.
 * Also used on the other end of the spectrum when a character is doing something they should have outgrown.
 * No, Doofenshmirtz isn't too old to build a fort, and Linda isn't too old to rock.
 * Marissa Faireborn in Transformers Generation 1, commander of Earth Defence Command. While her age is never explicitly stated, certain details mean she cannot be older than 20 (though the Japanese continuity allows her to be as old as 25, and possibly a former Idol Singer).
 * In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang is easily the most powerful bender ever in the world, which he gained 4 years earlier than he was supposed to; he also did not had the traditional training like his predecessors.
 * Of course being the Avatar naturally granted him incredible powers. However this does not excuse his friends and enemies who were in his age group. Benders such as Zuko, Toph, Azula, and Katara, as well as badass normals such as Sokka, the Kyoshi Warriors, the rest of Ozai's angels, Jet and his freedom fighters are all incredibly powerful and trained, capable of fighting on equal terms against adults; who had years if not decades of expriences over them.
 * Now, imagine these kids after 10 or 20 years.
 * To be fair, these kids grew up in a hostile, war-torn environment that provided them with opportunities for learning combat skills. Toph trained underground with badgermoles years before her first appearance in the show; Azula and Zuko almost certainly begain training at a very young age, due to their royal status; the Kyoshi Warriors also started training as small children; neither Katara nor Sokka were particularly badass when the show began and gained warrior skills over the course of their journey, after they left the relative safety and shelter of their village; Mai was left to her own (sharp and pointy) devices growing up; Ty Lee ran away and joined a circus; and the Freedom Fighters are orphans who raised each other and fought Fire Nation troops on a regular basis.
 * In addition, most of the kids had to be that good to survive. The reason that all the kids we see in the show are skilled in some manner of fighting is because children who couldn't take care of themselves and/or had no parents to provide for them wouldn't make it for very long. And parents won't be much help if your village is destroyed or the army decides to draft you and send you to the front lines. The characters we're watching are the ones who were good enough to make it this far.
 * Toph has a ready-made excuse; being blind, earth bending is the easiest way for her to get around unaided, and necessity often means speedy learning.
 * The titular character in Ruby Gloom owns a house despite being aged somewhere between 9 and 14.
 * Actually, Word of God says she's in her early twenties, although she doesn't look it.
 * Pound Puppies has Holly owning a puppy pound despite being about 12. Averted in season 2 where her aunt Katrina owns the pound.
 * An episode of The Simpsons has Ralph Wiggum running for the US presidency even though the minimum age is 35 years and he never went to electoral college. Lazily explained with Bart explaining that under the Bush administration the constitution has been rendered meaningless.
 * South Park thrives on this trope, especially in the later seasons.
 * At the age of 14, Kim Possible is already established as an international crimefighter. Her Mission Control Wade is 12 and a college graduate, and later, Ron's adopted sister can smack down ninjas at the age of three (though she's a Chosen One).
 * Parodied on The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, when the leader of the Dinobanoids on Billy's favorite cartoon is a boy about 12 years old, yet goes by the title of "Professor".

Real Life

 * Five people took down HBGary. The one who social engineered their admin was a 16 year old girl. A 16 YEAR OLD GIRL WAS INSTRUMENTAL TO TAKING DOWN A SECURITY COMPANY THAT HAS CONTRACTS WITH THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
 * Artur Rimbaud is one of the most acclaimed poets of the 19th century. His first poem was published when he was 15, and he completely gave up creative writing at the age of 20. Rimbaud went on to live for 17 more years, dying at 37, but he wrote no more poetry during those years.
 * Brazilian writers Rachel de Queiroz and Clarice Lispector. The first published her novel O Quinze, one of the most important books on Brazilian literature, when she was 20. The latter, who had books published all over the world, including places such as China and Vietnam, and was once called the Brazilian Franz Kafka by translator Gregory Rabassa, published her first book, Near the Wild Heart, when she was 23...and wrote it when she was 19.
 * Most female elite gymnasts reach their peak between 15-18, and anyone in their twenties is referred to as 'old.'
 * It's surprising in Casanova's autobiography how young people started in the Enlightenment - leaving aside all the 13-year-olds he seduced, Casanova was a doctor and almost a priest by the age of 16, and in the army by 18. Values Dissonance, anybody?
 * Napoleon was a subaltern officer at 16 and a Brigadier General at 24 (his studies at the École Militaire took only a bit longer than 1 year). During the Age of Enlightenment, skills and knowledge were held dear by the ruling elite, but they were still expensive to acquire for ordinary people, so anyone who rushed himself through school was needed and they would turn a blind eye to small faults like "he's too young".
 * Alexander the Great. Conquered most of the known world in his late teens and died just shy of 33.
 * During the American Civil War, Colonel Charles R. Ellet at the age of 19 took command of the Cool Steam Ship his father built, the USS Queen of the West. He then wreaked havoc against confederate ships and shipping in the vicinity of Vicksburg.
 * George Armstrong Custer started the American Civil War as a Second Lieutenant and was brevetted Major General of volunteers while only in his early 20s.
 * Armstrong wasn't even the youngest Civil War general. The youngest one was Galusha Pennypacker, who joined the US Army at age 17, was promoted to Major after only a few months, and was promoted to Brigadier General of volunteers at the age of 20. He became known as the only US general who wasn't even old enough to vote.
 * In World War Two there was one US Army aviator who was promoted from 1st Lieutenant to full Colonel (4 full ranks) in just 17 months.
 * Jimmy Page founded Led Zeppelin in 1968 at the age of 24. Before that, he was offered the role as a guitarist in The Yardbirds in 1964 (though for a variety of reasons, he didn't actually accept until 1966.) Before that he was a prolific session musician, and contributed to several songs which reached #1, and even played a song on a British television show at the age of 13.
 * Ilya Svetlichnyi was a passable rock drummer at an age of three.
 * Martial arts movie star Jet Li won his first gold medal in national wushu competition at the age of twelve, and retired from competition to work as a coach at the age of seventeen.
 * Arkady Gaidar, a Soviet writer, was a regiment commander in the Red Army of the Russian Civil War while he was 16. When the war was over, he became a writer.
 * Child mujahideens and similar child "soldiers" are an all-too-common, and tragic, problem in Third World countries facing violent civil conflict.
 * George Washington became a Colonel when he was 22.
 * At 20, Augustus was already a triumvir, one of the three most powerful men in Rome
 * In his twenties Pompey gained the command of three legions, made successful campaigns in Sicily and Africa, and gained his first triumph. He also became consul when he was, by law, several years too young. It was amazingly impressive at the time.
 * According to oral tradition, Sundiata Keita was only 18 when he founded the Mali Empire.
 * Joan of Arc never got out of her teens at all; she was about sixteen or seventeen when she led the French to a series of victories against the English - and managed to do this without even the advantage of being of noble birth or male.
 * Royal Navy Midshipmen did start off at age 12 or so. They could be expected to command men, men 20 years older, as needed being in the chain of command.
 * War tends to do this. The average age of the entire US Armed forces in WWII was 26, but there were entire units where no one (up to and including the CO and senior noncoms) was older than 30. Improbable age promotions mostly tended to happen in specialist units like the comandos, paratroopers, and air forces where being young enough to withstand the physical demands was an asset. Note that the youngest U.S. General in World War II was 36 year old paratrooper James "Jumpin' Jim" Gavin
 * Revolutions amplify this; while this happened from time to time under the ancien régime, with Rocroi being won by a 21 years old duke of Enghien (a member of the house of Bourbon), Napoleon himself was 24 when he became a general, gained command of the italian theater of war at 25 and was 27 by the time the Italian campaign ended. Some of his marshals were equally young when they became generals in the republic; about half of them were colonels in their 20s, general officers at 30 or so, and the youngest of the marshals, Davout, got the baton at 34.
 * By the end of World War 1 boys as young as 13 were being enlisted into the army in the U.K because most of the men over 18 had already been called up and died. Offically they should of been over 18 but either they lied about their age or the army lied about their age.
 * Dwight D. Eisenhower is an interesting case: In WWI he was quickly promoted from Lieutenant to full Colonel and placed in command of the entire US Tank Corps. (His demotion after the war ended was even quicker but they gave him a capitaincy as a consolation prize.) He'd only just made his way back to Colonel by the time WWII broke out but once the US entered the war he was once again quickly promoted (over the heads of many more senior officers) to command Allied forces in Europe.
 * Billy Connolly did a bit on about a 22 year old Feng Shui expert; "When you're twenty-two you're not an expert on any-fucking-thing!"
 * Not as incredibly young as most on this page, but Thomas Fairfax became the senior officer in command of the Parliamentarian army during the Three Kingdoms Wars (British Civil Wars) at the tender age of 33. Admittedly the war was conducted largely by people with no prior experience of warfare so anyone talented enough would rise high quickly. It helped that he was also politically acceptable and convenient, less politically minded and more malleable than his elder subordinates Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell.
 * William Pitt the Younger was Prime Minister of Britain at the age of 24. It probably helped that his father previously held the position, but this didn't stop him losing a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons on account of his age, and ignoring it. He would eventually stay Prime Minister for the next 18 years.
 * Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a virtuoso musician by the age of four. and was composing small pieces by the age of five.
 * Federick Chopin' pieces were being published when he was seven and he was being celebrated as a composer.
 * Chess player Garry Kasparov became a master at 14, a Grandmaster at 17 and then the world champion at 22!
 * Grandmaster Kasparov, you old-timer, meet Hou Yifan -- current women's world chess champion, and seventeen years old.
 * Many boxers and other fighters become professionals before they are eighteen.
 * Mary Shelley, S.E. Hinton, and Christopher Paolini all had novels published while still in their late teens.
 * Emily Grace Reaves is starting her own clothing line, the Emily Grace Collection, to be sold by Ooh! La La Couture. How old was she when she started the clothing line? Eight.
 * Tavi Gevinson was 11 years old when she began her own fashion blog. By age 13, she designed shirts for a London label. The next year, she became a contributor to Vogue, and by 2011 she had launched Rookie, an online publication for teenage girls.
 * Évariste Galois, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, started reading doctoral-level maths books like novels while at school, was rejected from France's top mathematical institution because the professors weren't clever enough to understand his work, invented a new and monumentally important branch of mathematics while in prison for revolutionary activity and died aged twenty in a duel over a girl.
 * Galois was a mathematical genius who did most of his math in his head, so his proofs were shockingly incomplete -- there were many gaps in them because he'd done the math mentally, so it wasn't quite so much not being clever enough to understand as it was him being a bit too cocky and thinking everyone would understand him on their own.
 * Cracked.com presents the "5 Shockingly Powerful Kids Who Make You Look Like a Coward". It begins with Johnny and Luther Htoo, twin Child Soldiers who successfully defended their village on their own from an invading army before quickly becoming the leaders of God's Army at the age of nine. It ends with Iqbal Masih, an 11-years old who escaped slavery and became spokesman for the Bonded Labor Liberation Front (a group dedicated to freeing child slaves), liberating 3,000 children before he was assassinated at the age of thirteen because of his worldwide-reknowned fight against child labour. Geez, they make the achievements of several fictional examples look puny in comparison.
 * Friedrich Nietzsche at the age of 24 became the Chair of Classical Philology at Basel University. He did not have a Ph.D. and hadn't even completed his doctoral dissertation. He was given the chair almost solely on the recommendation of the philologist Friedrich Ritschl, who had never taught a more talented philologist than Nietzsche. Nietzsche is still the youngest person to have ever held this position.
 * There's a belief that the great theorists (mainly in physics and mathematics) make their most ground-breaking discoveries before the age of 30, and work they do after is of lesser importance or an elaboration of their early work.
 * The younger generation of English Romantics are somewhat renowned for their short, intense lives: John Keats died of tuberculosis at 25, Shelley was lost at sea a month before his thirtieth birthday and Byron made it all the way to 36 before contracting a fatal fever fighting in the Greek War of Independence. All three of them are firmly established as some of the greatest poets of the English language.
 * Professional Starcraft players tend to be in their teens or early 20s. Over 25 is considered old; White Ra is nearly 30 and is commonly called Grandfather Protoss.
 * Carl von Clausewitz started his military career when he was twelve years old as a lance corporal and ended it 26 years later as a major-general.
 * Nazi Germany became so desperate for soldiers by the end of the war that they had children who hadn't yet reached puberty put on the front lines.