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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"Hi, I’m terrible at perspective. Not with life, but with buildings and materials. So forgive me if I get buildings wrong, I hope I make up for it by getting my perspective on mankind right."''
|'''Doug TenNapel''', ''[[Ratfist]]'' [http://ratfist.com/page-3/ page 3]}}
As a general rule, the depictions of the size, age, or other aspects of characters and objects in fiction are not particularly consistent. This is thanks in large part due to the fact that artists are not
Clever writers will often recognize these limitations by deliberately avoiding clearly classifying character's traits like [[Improbable Age|age]], height, power, or minor biographical
Contradictions arising from the implications of this trope can get involved in pretty much any facet of fiction involving [[Writers Cannot Do Math|math]], from [[Dawson Casting]] to [[Power Level|bizarre tiers of superpowers]]. Sorting algorithm tropes can mitigate this to a large extent, as it avoids measuring anything objectively by instead only measuring things relative to other fictional objects. Even then, size and height is a consistent problem area, as most mundane objects do have general sizes, even if the writers forget this.
[[Your Size May Vary]] is a subtrope. [[Bizarrchitecture]] is what happens when an artist deliberately invokes this trope to create an eerie, otherworldly effect as opposed to an [[Off-Model]] one.
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* Until ''[[Digimon Savers]]'', the English ''[[Digimon]]'' dubs tended to increase the age of characters, also lengthening how long the [[Time Skip]] between ''[[Digimon Adventure]]'' and ''[[Digimon Adventure 02]]'' was to further this end. Fans don't seem to be particularly bothered by this since characters are supposed to reflect the age of audience, and enough characters are [[Competence Zone|modified equally that there is no real change]].
* Hikaru in ''[[Magic Knight Rayearth]]'' was given a precise height of five feet (1m50). Presumably other characters are roughly equated with her, though because of the art style many of the taller characters seem to be unusually tall applying this across the
* ''[[
* ''[[Sailor Moon]]'''s author gave only its main character a specific height from which the others are mostly extrapolated. This became tricky as more characters were introduced, since [[Huge Schoolgirl]] Makoto was no longer the tallest character but was certainly not over six feet tall. Both the dubs [[Pragmatic Adaptation|tends to shy away from addressing this directly]], while the [[Live Action Adaptation]] simply regresses it back to her original pseudo-Yankee design.
** Indeed, barring direct translations from merchandise, the issue of relative heights was mostly avoided, possibly because the perception of "tall" varies widely across the world. On the flip side, Usagi herself is sufficiently ''short'' that adaptations sometimes have to ignore it.
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* [[Eyeshield 21]] relies a lot on skewed perspective and the character's perception based on their emotional state. For example, the first time the Deimon meets Taiyou, the Sphinx players look like 10 feet tall monster (Murata even lampshades this); This is because the Devilbats are intimidated by the heavier, stronger, and more experienced players. By the time the two teams meet again, the Sphinx are perceived for what they really are: unusually large and strong, but still human.
** Similarly, Mamori seems tall because she's viewed as a mature mother figure. Ikkyu is perceived as quite short because he's the [[Butt Monkey]] of the Nagas. Height in Eyeshield seems to be indicated more by personality and perception rather then what's realistic.
* Over the course of the twenty episodes of the ''[[Tenchi Muyo!]]'' OVA series, the Masaki house goes through at least four distinct versions. Most of the changes are due to remodelling (or complete rebuilding), but episode 3 reveals that the earliest version of the house is impossible: the lounge doesn't fit inside the exterior walls, the kitchen has exterior windows where there should be an interior wall, and so on. One scene requires Aeka's bedroom to be on the second floor of one side of the house, facing the lake, while a second scene, only minutes after the first, requires it to be on the third floor of the opposite side of the house, in a location that doesn't exist at that point in the story and facing a direction that makes nonsense of the earlier scene, while Sasami is seen standing in a corridor that doesn't exist prior to episode 7. Different animators may have been working from different floor plans. Or maybe Yog-Sothoth was the architect.
** [[Fridge Brilliance|Considering]] that there are {{spoiler|3 gods in residence}}, this might be entirely justified.
* ''[[
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* An interesting art mistake occurred in ''[[The Ultimates]] 3'', in which Wolverine was drawn as smaller than the male Ultimate members. While his main universe version is supposed to be small, in the Ultimate Universe he was officially stated to be 1.81 (a skoch under six feet) meters tall from the very start.
** As this was one of many errors which saw the 616 versions of the characters transposed onto the Ultimate universe versions in one way, shape or form, it's possible that this one is down to [[Did Not Do the Research]] on the part of the artist and / or writer.
* ''[[
== [[Literature]] ==
* [[
** Similarly, the Burrow is said to actually look like it's probably propped up by magic, the Room of Requirement [[Shaped Like Itself|grows as required]], and many confined spaces, like the [[Flying Car|flying Ford Anglia]] and the tent from the Quidditch World Cup, are [[Bigger
* [[Dr. Seuss]] took pride in this, his building illustrations being famously cartoonish and bizarre.
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[Star Trek:
** The other problem is that there are no reference points in space. As a result Klingon ships of the exact same type ranged from a few times larger than shuttles to a few times larger than the Enterprise itself (though they're canonically half its size) depending on where they were relative to the camera.
** With the 2009 film, it has been revealed that the FX people have decided the new old new ''Enterprise'' is at least twice as big as the one Kirk captained... even though it's the one he captained.
*** Unless it isn't. The time travel stuff happened before the construction of the Enterprise, so it may or may not be the same as the original. Seeing as the interior looks nothing alike, we're probably meant to assume any changes are from the new timelines.
* The [http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=gX9FU8bmxQs opening titles] to ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'' include a sequence where Voyager is seen reflected off a gas giant's rings. The Voyager would need to be several thousand kilometers in length for this to occur. Even if it wasn't a gas giant, it would need to be much, much larger than its canonical length.
** Some believe that a ship travelling at warp magnifies its visual appearance several times over, which is why the Klingon ship seems to be half the size of the sun in ''[[Star Trek IV:
* The interior of Starbug on ''[[
* The ''[[Battlestar Galactica]]'' movie ''The Plan'' does this to the Cylon baseships. At one point there is a fleet of them surrounding Caprica, and the camera is moving through space, causing both the ships ''and the planet itself'' to change appearance due to parallax. It basically makes the basestars look like they're a few hundred kilometers across. The shifting camera even causes one of the baseships to rise from over the planet's limb (meaning it was on the other side of the planet), and it's shape can still be discerned. In fact, by comparing the size of the baseship to a raider, and then a raider to a person, a Colonial human must be somewhere around the size of a ''football field''.
** A pretty clear example of [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]].
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== Video Games ==
* Supposedly in ''[[Bully (
** Girls do tend to be taller than boys at that age, earlier puberty making them grow sooner but not as much. Probably not that tall, though.
* ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' characters are often cited by official supplementary material as having ages which seem [[Improbable Age|absurdly young]] compared to [[Artistic Age|their in-game sprites and portraits]], not to mention their roles in the story. Perhaps the most [[Egregious]] example being the Mysidian [[Half-Identical Twins]] Palom and Porom from ''[[Final Fantasy]] IV'', whose age is cited as 5. For what it's worth, the GBA remake did make their portraits look younger (probably no younger than 7-8, though).
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*** Quistis is one year older than most of the key characters and graduated in the previous class. So the Garden was indeed a little hesitant, but not about her abilities (which were quite ample, thank you) -- it was mostly about her ''inexperience''.
** This does become rather amusing when characters from varying games have to interact with each other in ''[[Dissidia Final Fantasy]].'' For example, Bartz from ''[[Final Fantasy V]]'' is officially older than Squall of ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'' but you wouldn't know it from seeing the two of them rendered side by side. Let's not even touch how Zidane's Genome heritage apparently means that he can't clear the five foot mark.
* ''[[Pokémon|Pokemon]]'' is probably one of the worst offenders, concerning Pokédex information. A noteworthy example is the Rock Snake Pokémon Onix, which, although being 8.8 m long and made of boulders (the diameters of which range from Red's height to double his height)... weighs only 210
** Better yet there's Wailord, a whale Pokémon that is 47 feet long yet only weighs about half a ton. What is it made out of, bubblewrap?
*** Worse yet, in the anime Ash once allowed a Hippopotas (a hippo-like Pokémon almost twice the length of Pikachu) to hitch a ride on his head, like Pikachu or Aipom usually does/did. Pikachu weighs about 13
*** As does Cacnea (weighs in at about 113
**** Or it's a particularly small Cacnea. It's distinctly implied that the values given in the Pokédex are ''averages'', not solid numbers.
*** Though she ''is'' deceptively strong, [[Pokémon Special|Sapphire]] has been seen with her Aron on her shoulder. Aron weigh (on average) 132.3
*** Another mind-bending example is Spinda. The height of a five-year-old, the weight of a terrier. Apparently Spinda are made of hallucinations and pixie dust.
** Apparently, the Pokédex only refer to the average weight of Pokémon.
*** Most mons are seriously underweight for the volume. Depending on how you take the Wailord measures (height vs length) for example, he's either has about the same density as air at the heaviest, or a bit lighter then hydrogen. Onixes are 8.8m (nearly 29 feet) giant stone snakes weighting about 210kgs (463 pounds). Rapidashes weight an average of 95kgs, while a real life light riding horse weights around 400-500kgs. The Tauros is at 88.
** The height of characters of the day is also in rather wild flux. If one considers Brock to be a slightly-less-than-average-sized young adult, every few episodes the cast runs into ten foot tall bearmen.
* A somewhat literal application of this trope: In an issue of ''Game Informer'' magazine, the creators of the newest ''[[Red Faction]]'' game have reported that due to the new, highly realistic physics engine used to show the effects of damaging things, and would allow the player to damage a building enough to topple it. It turned out that many of the buildings they'd designed have proven to be structurally unsound, and collapsed under their own weight shortly after being placed in the environment. Consequently, the devs have had to ''learn'' some architecture to continue work on the game.
* Cautionary tale: Bungie hired real architects to design the environments from ''[[Oni]]''. One of the most-cited problems with the game's art direction was that the environments look samey and boring.
** Bungie had previously been known as very [[Game Mod]]-friendly, but the prospect of editing tools was made rather unlikely due to the fact that ''Oni'''s characters were made and animated with 3DS Max and its levels were built with AutoCad. Both are tools of the trade for their respective professions, and both cost thousands of dollars a copy.
* ''[[City of Heroes]]'' suffers from this pretty badly, since the default height in the incredibly robust character creator is nearly 6 feet, and goes all the way up to 8 feet. As a result, characters of realistic height can be dwarfed by civilian NPCs, then there's the great big [[Super Soldier]] whom you keep hitting [[Groin Attack|right in the crotch]]... and then let's not get started on the borderline [[
** To make things worse, the game's own development team can't seem to make heads or tails of their own height system, routinely creating supposedly regular university professors who are nevertheless tall enough to give any NBA player an inferiority complex. Worse still is that even at "normal" size, most cars look so small that a person would have to drive them with his head between his knees. On the other hand, aside from the wildly varying "normal" heights, there really aren't too many things "more giant" than they need to be when it comes to giant monsters.
* More a "game engine designers have no sense of scale" one: in ''[[Pangya]]'', the hole elevation reading is frequently way too large given the visual evidence. Case in point: character standing in bunker just below the green with ball at her feet. Surface of green (and hence hole level) is just above waist height. Hole elevation reading? ''Two point one metres''. Making Hana (a typical schoolgirl), just over ''eleven feet tall''.
* In ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 4'', Snake's height and weight was given as
** Note, however, that Snake is nearly at the end of his life in Metal Gear Solid 4, and numerous characters comment on how far his body has decayed. His new Octocamo suit is low-grade [[Powered Armor
***
* The ''[[Twisted Metal]]'' series has this in spades. The most notable instance is probably when Axel, a man on a platform stuck between two giant wheels, drives next to the "civilians" in the game, and appears about four or five times taller than they are. He, the motorbike guy, and other "small" vehicles are all as tall as most ''houses''.
* In the ''[[Crusader:
* [[Metroid|Samus]] is stated to be 6
** Which actually fits the Other M's [[Values Dissonance]] in a way that's [[Fridge Brilliance]].
** She's not shorter, everyone else is just really freaking huge.
* In ''[[Mass Effect 2]]'', the Normandy SR-2 is a ship that is (judging by in-game descriptions) at least four decks tall, with the top deck (Command Centre and the cockpit) alone being noticeably several feet higher than any human character (including Commander Shepard). However, the ship is modeled to be ''much'' smaller during its appearances in the Suicide Mission. While the crashed ship looks relatively massive when the specialists first exit it, it becomes much smaller during the {{spoiler|end run, when Shepard (and his team, if they survived) run towards the Normandy, which is hovering in mid-air}}. The ship itself is modeled to be just slightly larger (height-wise) than Joker, who is standing at the port airlock and is almost as tall as the ship itself. This is also prevalent during several other in-engine cutscenes where the main cast directly enter the Normandy itself.
** The main airlock, where the characters enter or exit the ship is located at the very, very
** In cutscenes the krogan are huge, towering over every other character. However, in the gameplay itself, everybody is the same height. The developers had to settle for this compromise, since larger krogan kept getting stuck in objects all the time in the playtesting.
* ''[[Freelancer]]'': When flying in space, full-size planets are no larger than a few hundred meters in diameter.
* Don't ever try to reconcile the sizes of the vehicles, your character's size, the sizes of the buildings, and the sizes of the evacuees that emerge from the buildings in [[Blast Corps]]. It will only end in headaches and tears.
* ''[[Super Robot Wars]]'' does this on purpose through the use of [[Super-Deformed]] character sprites, thanks to the height discrepancy between some of the [[Humongous Mecha]]. For example, ''[[Super Robot Wars Z|Z2: Hakai-hen]]'' has ''[[VOTOMS]]'' and ''[[Code Geass]]'' (with mecha that average 4 meters/13 feet) and ''[[Gurren Lagann]]'' ([[Serial Escalation|whose title mecha eventually reaches the size of a galaxy]]); imagining anything from the former damaging the latter [[Willing Suspension of Disbelief|would be impossible without the concession]].
** Precisely once has ''SRW'' used non-SD sprites, that being the oft-maligned ''Shin Super Robot Wars''/''Super Robot Wars Neo''. The sprites were still
** Emphasized in ''SRW'' spinoff ''[[Another
== Webcomics ==
* ''[[Megatokyo]]'' kicks this trope to the curb. Before changing careers to "full-time comic artist", Fred "Piro" Gallagher was, by trade, an architectural draftsmen.
* ''[[The Life of Nob T. Mouse]]'' does this on purpose since it was originally supposed to look like a child had drawn it.
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** As acknowledged in the [[DVD Commentary]], it's not consistent whether Sokka and Aang are skinny and scrawny or lean yet muscular.
** The artbook however has Toph listed around a foot shorter then what the commercial stated.
* ''[[
** The most outrageous example of this is from ''[[Transformers:
*** Even worse, the Constructicons actually combine into a fully formed Devastator who is able to stand comfortably at his full height inside the cargo hold of Astrotrain's space shuttle alt-mode with plenty of room still to spare for the rest of the Decepticon lineup.
** [http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Scale Scale in Transformers is, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed.]
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