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Immortal Immaturity: Difference between revisions
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Fair enough when you're talking about an alien species or fantasy race with a very long lifespan. [[Older Than Feudalism|Ancient vampires]] who behave like teenagers -- or even like ordinary adults -- may present more of a strain on credibility, relative to the seriousness of the genre in which they appear.
Often justified in the sense that an immortal wouldn't have to deal with many of the psychological aspects of growing older. Their bodies don't break down with age, so they don't have to come to terms with decreased mobility or mental capacity. They won't die of natural causes, so they don't have to contemplate the inevitability of death, or the possibility of an eternal reward (or punishment) and all the moral responsibility that might carry. They don't have to worry about their legacy or leaving anything unfinished, [[Living Forever Is Awesome|because there really]] ''[[Living Forever Is Awesome|is]]'' [[Living Forever Is Awesome|always tomorrow]]. Because of all this, these characters never need to "grow up" in the sense that a mortal does.
A darker take of this would be where the immaturity is a facade, and in fact the character does have inner angsts and turmoils that most mortals actually wouldn't be able to relate to. For example, being immortal but having mortal friends would essentially mean that you would have to watch them age and eventually perish, and while you wouldn't have to wonder about what awaits you in the afterlife, the question of what will happen to you when the world ends and there are no more people remains - thus, inner angst is generated over stuff that mortals don't have to worry about, but is kept hidden except for special episodes when the immortal character gets the spotlight, when such issues are thrown into light for development purposes.
Also, there are those who argue that absent changes to the body, the rate of 'change' to the mind slows even in real life, that is, the changes between birth and age 10 are vastly bigger than the changes from 10 to 20, which in turn are much larger than the difference between 20 and 40 or even 20 and 60. This argument would have it that absent the bodily changes of old age, the changes from 50 to 500 might not be so extensive as one would otherwise expect.
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* ''[[The Twelve Kingdoms]]'': There are immortal characters who are over a hundred years old, but still act and consider themselves as teenagers.
* Evangeline of ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' likes to act refined (difficult when she has to look up at the person), but sometimes lapses into childish whimpering (usually when she trips and falls). Whenever she starts to subvert this and act her age, [[Robot Girl|Chachamaru]] usually tells her "please don't start pretending you're old."
** She even lampshades this on at least one occasion, laughing ruefully about how her [[Really Seven Hundred Years Old|pre-pubecent]] form [[The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body|influences her self-perception and personality]].
** It's also implied that Albireo "Colonel Sanders" Imma is much older than he appears. He spends a good chunk of his post-Tournament Arc appearance making fun of Evangeline. Especially her [[Embarrassing Middle Name|middle name.]]
* {{spoiler|Rika}} from ''[[Higurashi no Naku Koro ni]]'' could be considered something of a subversion. Despite being [[Really Seven Hundred Years Old]], her outward behavior and speech patterns are still those of an adorable, cheerful girl. As it turns out though, this is only an act so as not to alarm everyone who's oblivious to Hinamizawa's dark secret. Mentally, she's a rather serious adult. That said, she hasn't grown nearly as old mentally as she thinks she has.
** Played straight with {{spoiler|Hanyuu, a.k.a Oyashiro-sama}}, who's even older, but is really quite shy and easily flustered.
*** She can be quite serious and mature though. The manga tends to make her overly mature, and the anime tends to make her too immature.
* Hinako Ninomiya of ''[[Ranma ½
** Don't forget Happosai, whose general outlook on life can be summarized roughly as "five year old child with the hormones of a [[All Men Are Perverts|stereotypical boy]] just hitting puberty".
* In ''[[Mermaid Saga|Mermaid's Scar]]'', a subversion occurs when an immortal who has lived for 800 years as an 8 year-old boy only ''acts'' as a child to keep up appearances; his mind is anything but childish.
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* In ''[[Tom Strong]]'', Tesla Strong, despite really being seventy-five years old, looks, acts, and is treated like a teenager.
* {{spoiler|Topher}}, the vampire foe of the ''[[Runaways]]'', is an aversion. He hasn't aged past being a teenager in 100 years. Hasn't stopped him from making a killing on the stock markets in the 1920s and losing it all in the Dot Com bubble.
* In ''[[The Superhero Squad Show]]'' comic, Eternity is revealed to be an avid collector of entities.
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* ''[[Peter Pan]]'' is all about this, his skills with a blade on par with those of Captain Hook notwithstanding. Justified in his case, since his overwhelming desire to be immature is why he became immortal in the first place.
* In ''[[Dragonlance]]'', Paladine, the god of good, when in his avatar form is rather a comic figure. Some of that might be [[Obfuscating Stupidity]] but it is implied that some of it is also his real character.
** Paladine's more [[Eccentric Mentor]] than anything. He may ''act'' eccentric and amusing, but even as [[Cloudcuckoolander|Fizban]] he's always on top of what's going on.
* In [[Harry Turtledove]]'s Fox series, the gods are [[Spoiled Brat|SpoiledBrats]] because, being nearly all-powerful, no one can discipline them. The only exception is the All-Seeing Ikos, and even he can be manipulated by his pride.
* The gods of [[David Eddings]]' ''[[Elenium]]'' and to a significantly lesser extent Dweia from ''The Redemption of Althalus'' are prone to some rather immature emotionalism. It's explicitly explained by the world-weary Sparhawk and the worldly con man Althalus in both cases as almost stemming ''from'' their immortal nature; having never needing to fear death or be chastised they don't develop maturity as well in some aspects of their personality.
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* The fey in ''[[Wicked Lovely]]''. They are immortal, or at least [[Really Seven Hundred Years Old]], but they very rarely act or look anything more than early-twenties. Probably the best example is Keenan, who is a 900 hundred year old teenager in pretty much all respects.
* ''[[Honor Harrington]]'' occasionally addresses the implications of slowing the aging process and how much of your personality is influenced by hormone levels based on your age. Puberty and its associated mood swings has years added on to it.
* In [[Chronicles of Amber]], most of the Amberite Princes initially think and act like [[Prince Charmless|charmless]] [[Royal Brat|Royal Brats]], but as the series goes on and conflicts force them to work together, develop into [[The Wise Prince]].
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*** And, of course, Peter David would make Trelane a Q (non-canonically) in the novel ''Q-Squared''.
** Jadzia Dax, though not technically immortal, has several lifetimes of experience. Yet you wouldn't know it if [[Informed Attribute|they hadn't told you about it.]]
* Averted with ''[[Highlander (TV series)|Highlander: The Series]]''. Given the way they live -- constantly on the lookout for people with swords, forced into kill-or-be-killed duels, watching mortal friends grow old and die, moving around to avoid detection -- most Immortals trade their immaturity for a more practical outlook on life. The only immortal child shown uses his apparent innocence as a honey trap so he can kill other Immortals.
== Mythology ==
* The gods in many religions seem to be rather immature.
** Sometimes this is a case of giving educational tales, using gods as examples, rather than making the gods outright immature - Hinduism is filled with stories like this for example, despite that in their canon gods are too great to even directly interact with the mortal world.
* The [[Classical Mythology|ancient Greek]] gods are constantly interested in the affairs of mortals; they also breed with mortals. They don't seem to learn anything from experience, as far as wisdom is concerned. They are petty, cruel and constantly fighting amongst each other.
** The train of events that led to the Trojan war began with Eris getting pissed over not being invited to a wedding. The modern day religion of Discordianism uses this tale as its jumping-off point.
** It's worth noting that this is a shifting trope - in the Classic period the Greeks considered their gods to be akin to humans, but ''morally perfect''. Then they got hit by a severe case of [[Flanderization]], and by the time Homer got his hands on them, they were a bunch of immature morons; perhaps a case cultural cynicism towards the arbitrariness of nature's forces had hit them hard.
*** Since Homer lived several hundred years before the Classical period, the trope shift was in the opposite direction.
**** D'oh!
** There is a difference, however, between the gods in the myths and the way they were thought of in religious ceremonies. The Greeks also saw their gods as having multiple aspects that were so different that it was possible to be perfectly devoted to and blessed by one aspect of Zeus while being on another aspect of Zeus' bad side. Compare the difference Between God as He/She/It is ''worshipped'' by the Abrahamic faiths with God's ''character'' in [[The Bible]] and Koran.
*** God doesn't appear much as a character in the Koran...
*** A better comparison would be God in the Old and the New Testament, as well as contrasting between Abraham's and Moses's relationship with Him - the difference is so massive that some scholars believe that Abraham's deity was entirely different from Moses's, and they were interpreted as one and the same through an [[Orwellian Retcon]].
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[Xenogears]]'' features several characters who are quasi-immortal. Some have lived for hundreds of years, a few for as many as ten thousand. {{spoiler|Emperor Cain and the Gazel Ministry}} act as one might imagine. The former is a world-weary, very old man who has kept his moral compass intact due to guilt over a sin committed long ago, the former being very anxious to transcend to a higher level of existence and possessing of no moral compass whatsoever. Then, there is {{spoiler|Miang}}, who has lived as long, but in a different manner: she possesses a new body when her current one dies. When we meet her, she has the body of a beautiful young woman and appears to act like one, being flirtatious and sexually-active. Yet, it's difficult to tell how genuine this is, because her entire existence is devoted to executing the mother of all [[Plan|plans]], and everything she does serves this end.
* In the ''[[Touhou]]'' series, the vampire Flandre Scarlet has a justified reason for typically being portrayed with a naive childish mentality: her sister Remilia has kept her locked-up in the house for the last 500+ years. She never gained perspective about the world. (And a bit insane on top of that.)
** Remilia herself is said to have the personality of a selfish, spoiled brat. She [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass|can get serious]] if the situation really merits her attention, and is actually [[Magnificent Bastard|remarkably on top of things]], but her behaviour is that of a spoiled nine-year-old about 95% of the time.
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** Ciel from ''[[Tsukihime]]'' has a similar situation going on, but in that case it's actually lampshaded in Kagetsu Tohya.
* Arcueid Brunestud, of the visual novel ''[[Tsukihime]]'', is also much like the previous entries. She's an ancient [[Our Vampires Are Different|True Ancestor]], but she was [[Tyke Bomb|bred to be a weapon]] and not a person by her own race, and so they kept her asleep all the time except when she was sent to kill someone... so her demeanour on the outside world is not unlike that of a curious and confident child, marveling at everything new she comes across and being generally naive and emotionally outspoken. [[Justified Trope|She really]] ''[[Justified Trope|isn't]]'' [[Justified Trope|any older emotionally than she acts.]]
* The angels and demons in the ''[[Disgaea]]'' series are all over a thousand years old, but since time flows differently in their dimensions, they age 100 times slower then normal and act exactly as old as they look.
* Xiaomu of ''[[Endless Frontier]]'' and ''[[Namco X Capcom]]''. She may be a 700+ year old sage fox, but she can be immature about certain things, enough to be even [[Spank the Cutie|spanked]] for them.
* Prishe from ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]'' is a [[Hot-Blooded]] [[Tsundere]]. Granted, she's only in her 30s chronologically, but she doesn't act 30.
* All of the four goddesses of ''[[Hyperdimension Neptunia]]'' exhibit this trope, one way or another.
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== [[Web Comics]] ==
* The undead warlock Richard from ''[[Looking for Group]]'' borders on [[Man Child]] at times.
* ''[[El Goonish Shive]]'' takes the effort to make it a [[Justified Trope]] as the immortals erase their own memories to avoid the complete boredom involved in knowing everything.
** Played straight with Chaos, the all powerful nobody-knows-what with the attention span of a gnat who manifests as a [[Creepy Child]].
** Its pretty clear that she's an immortal who refused to "die" (the erasing memories thing); the immortal who explained the whole thing mentioned that they get "more powerful and less sane" as time passes, which describes "Pandora Chaos Raven" (self-named) pretty well.
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{{quote|'''Misa:''' "Being the youngest of a race that lives forever means being eternally treated as the baby."}}
* In ''[[Order of the Stick]]'' Xykon is not particularly mature for an immortal lich with more than a century of life behind him. ''[[Start of Darkness]]'' reveals that he was never very mature to begin with, even as an eighty-year old man. He even lampshades how, even at his advanced age, his "life's wisdom" boils down to little more than "sure, being a badass villain is a barrel of laughs, but what's the point if you can't even enjoy the little things in life" (which to him is mostly watching people die gruesomely and drinking coffee). That said, Xykon can be surprisingly clever and patient if he ''wants'' to.
** Redcloak is another example, played in a different way. His aging processes has been retarded by the magical cloak he wears, and he's eventually called out on this by his ([[Big Little Brother|normally aging]]) younger brother: He's spent most of his time following the Dark One's directives (and later, Xykon's) and hasn't used any of that time to actually live a life; and because he never ages, he hasn't been forced to move on from [[Doomed Hometown|the tragedy]] of their past the way Right-Eye had to.
* Mab and most of the other Fae from ''[[Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures]]'', sort of. Essentially everything they do is a matter of "[[It Amused Me]]," but they operate and think in an entirely different way from anyone else, and evidence suggests that they can also be mature if that's what amuses them at the time. Additionally, since they're immortal and have a flexible view of time, this behavior might be a way to avoid going totally insane. There is also a somewhat sinister slant to their apparent immaturity, especially given their general view of things as being a game of sorts, and that fact that despite near-omnipotence they will still allow their friends to die in preventable ways.
** This behavior also appears in some of the mortal-but-extremely-long-lived characters. Abel and Kria don't always act like they are in their 400's. Dan and Regina have some excuse though since they actually are in their 20's.
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[[Category:This Index Will Live Forever]]
[[Category:Immortal Immaturity]]
[[Category:Alliterative Trope Titles]]
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