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{{trope}}
[[File:
Imagine that you are making a show which features teenagers alongside adults. You want to avoid [[Dawson Casting]], so you try to hire actual teens for these roles. But wait, these kids are taller than half the adult cast! The boys even have stubble and beards, and the girls... Basically, they don't look immature ''enough''. [[Reality Is Unrealistic|Half of the audience won't even believe that they are real teens]]. So how do you make them look definitely younger than those middle-aged adults? Let's hire the shortest ones possible!
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Part of this can be the visual effect of a show shot from a child's or teen's perspective. The adults tower over our protagonists in terms of authority, and the best way to demonstrate that is make them physically much taller (or the child physically much shorter) than they actually are or conceivably would be. This is especially true in animated shows, which can oftentimes have the [[Pint-Sized Kid|child reach no higher than the parents' knees despite almost nearing adolescence]]. Again, it's a visual clue as to the power dynamic.
Contrast: [[Dawson Casting]]. Or compare, as shorter/petite babyfaced actors can make a career off of it well into their thirties (even if
{{examples}}
▲== Anime & Manga ==
* All the pilots in ''[[Gundam Wing]]''; especially weird in [[Artistic Age|how they otherwise look way older]].
** [[Gundam Seed]] and its various sequels and spinoffs also has this happen a lot. It's especially noticeable in [[Gundam Seed Destiny]], in which the teen characters are still short despite there having been a two year time skip.
* All but one of the teen characters in ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]''. Shinji is especially noteworthy; his father is 6'1"/185 cm, extraordinarily tall for a Japanese male, yet at fourteen
** Not that this stops them from being [[Noodle People]].
** Considering Shinji is fourteen we can assume he's just recently hit puberty and hasn't reached a growth spurt yet.
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** Possibly justified by the fact that he's not human, therefore human biology doesn't apply to him.
** By the time ''[[Dragonball Z]]'' hits, this trope is averted. Teenaged Future!Trunks is almost as tall as Goku, and the 16-year old Gohan (seen closer to the end of the series) is one of the tallest members of the cast
* Averted (mostly) in ''[[Sailor Moon]]
* Compare the sizes of the adults and the teenagers in ''[[Code Geass]]''. It's surprising to see the 17/18 year old Lelouch, Kallen, and Suzaku compared to the 24 year old Clovis and the 28
* Despite being sixteen years old, ''[[Fullmetal Alchemist
** Though, to be fair to teens, Ed is stated as being short, even for a teenager. When teenage characters show up, they are often as tall or taller than the adults.
** The canon justifications for Ed's shortness are his refusal to drink milk and the weight of his prosthetic arm (initially made of
* In ''[[Gurren Lagann]]'', if you didn't have [[Word of God]] to tell you that Simon is supposed to be 14, you'd swear he was ''at most'' ten, [[Cute Shotaro Boy|which isn't helped by his]] [[Moe Stare]] or [[Tareme Eyes]]. Apparently he just didn't have a growth spurt until later on, since other teens in the series are more realistic in their hights.
* ''[[JoJo's Bizarre Adventure]]'' ping-pongs the issue, depending on the characters. Jotaro, Kakoyin and Josuke are tall and buff, but Koichi (nearly the same age as Josuke, or possibly the same) is a waist-height midget. One teenaged antagonist starts out tall but ''shrinks'' to Koichi's height after being beaten, as does another (presumably) adult antagonist.
* [[Averted]] for the most part in the ''[[Venus Versus Virus]]'' manga. A noticeable example happens to one of the younger side characters, Riku. He [http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/9243/ivenusversusvirusv01ch1.jpg starts out] as an elementary student, maybe ten or eleven. By the end volume he's grown quite [http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/2396/mvenusversusvirusv08p19.jpg tall over] the one year or so, being taller than several of the 14 - 15 year olds and almost as tall as his older sister.
== [[Comic Books]] ==
== Comics ==▼
* Any issue of ''[[Young Justice (comics)|Young Justice]]'' that had them standing alongside the Justice League. Assuming that Superman and the rest were around 6 feet tall, the YJ kids looked like they were closer to 4 feet. Disconcerting, given that most of the cast was about 16.
** Yes, but considering their hands were the same size as their heads, what say we chalk it up to the artist's style and say no more...
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* In ''[[Ultimate Spider-Man]]'', Peter Parker is shown to be about the same height as Aunt May, though most other people tower over him. Hilariously addressed when someone tells Flash Thompson that he thinks Peter Parker may be Spider-Man; Flash dismisses the idea out of hand because "Spider-Man is like, 6 feet tall!"
* Inverted somewhat disturbingly in ''[[Darkchylde]]'', where the title character looks like she could pass for a Sweedish bikini model, despite only being 16. Her clothes often being turned into [[Modesty Rags]] doesn't help.
* Averted in ''[[Zits]]'', where there's a gag that Jeremy would tower over his mother if he weren't constantly slouching. The creative team has stated that they deliberately made Jeremy the same height as his parents to create a symbolic "power struggle".▼
* Poor [[Captain Marvel|Billy Batson]] is sixteen years old, and despite the fact that he's supposed to grow into his "Marvel" form at some point, he still looks like a short, skinny kid.
* Usually averted in [[FoxTrot]], but in one storyline, Paige invites all of her friends to Peter's Halloween party. Her friends are all ''ridiculously'' short and - as Peter keeps reminding us - high school freshmen, meaning they're all about 14 years old.▼
==
* Probably how [[Michael J. Fox]] got away with playing teenage parts into his late twenties. Interestingly, ''[[Back to The Future]]'' partially averted this with Crispin Glover and Thomas F. Wilson, both of whom are over six feet.
* Both used and averted in British comic-action thriller ''[[4.3.2.1]]'': of the four female leads who around 18 or 19 two are if anything tall but the petite Ophelia Lovibond and Emma Roberts certainly fall under this. Lovibond in particular has [[Dawson Casting|less than a two year age gap]] between her and the older villain played by Michelle Ryan but because Ryan is much taller, Lovibond ''seems'' much younger.
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* [[Mark Wahlberg]]'s earliest roles were teens, despite his acting career beginning in his early twenties. The man is, depending on the source, no taller than 5'8".
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==▼
▲== Live-Action TV ==
* ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'' is a serious offender, depicting '''everyone''' from Claire's schools as shorter than 5'6", with the exception of West. Claire herself is only 5'1" The only characters shorter than Claire are Micah and Molly, simply due to the fact that they're still below the age of puberty.
** However, Elle is 24 and the same height as Claire. She tends to wear heels so she looks taller.
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* Averted on [[Degrassi]]. At the height of 5'8, Miriam Mcdonald was taller than her on-screen mother, Amanda Stepto. Stepto is only 5'2.
* Godric and Tommy from ''[[True Blood]]''. One is [[Really 700 Years Old|really 2,000 years old]] but was turned into a vampire [[Undead Child|at a young age]], while the other is an actual teenager. Both are played by shorter actors. The trope is averted with Jessica, however, who's the same age as Tommy but roughly average height (ie, she's taller than him).
* ''[[Home Improvement (TV series)|Home Improvement]]'' featured an aversion, as the boys all grew up to at least equal their parents in height—Brad and Mark grew so tall that an eventual gag in the show's opening was to have them stand in front, with their parents having to shuffle around to see past them.
* Averted in ''[[Freaks and Geeks]]''. Nick, played by then eighteen year old Jason Segel, is six-foot four and towers almost all other cast members (Except Dave Allen). The others are of average height and played by real teens or young adults. The only real instances of this are Linda Cardellini who is just over five feet tall and John Francis Daley who is at least noted as being short for his age.
== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==
▲* Averted in ''[[Zits]]'', where there's a gag that Jeremy would tower over his mother if he weren't constantly slouching. The creative team has stated that they deliberately made Jeremy the same height as his parents to create a symbolic "power struggle".
▲* Usually averted in [[FoxTrot]], but in one storyline, Paige invites all of her friends to Peter's Halloween party. Her friends are all ''ridiculously'' short and - as Peter keeps reminding us - high school freshmen, meaning they're all about 14 years old.
==
* In ''[[Spring Awakening]]'' the teenage characters are all supposed to be 13–15 years old, but in reality it is not usually feasible for actors near that age range to be hired, particularly with the amount of sexual content in the show. One of their strategies to make the actors look younger seems to be to make sure the majority are shorter than the adult actors. Consider [http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/2618/ldaf147cec4100b494a2af7.jpg this photo of the original off-Broadway cast] where the man six from the left and the woman four from the right are the "adults".
** Averted in Hungary; many of the actors playing teen boys were hired due to being long, lanky, and gawky-looking.
== [[Video Games]] ==▼
▲== Video Games ==
* In ''[[The Sims]] 2'', Sims at the "teenager" stage of life are shorter than those at the "adult" stage.
** Though Young Adult (seemingly about 17-21) is just as tall as the Adult stage, within an inch or at ''most'' two. The Teen stage does include all of puberty, though, and since the Sims don't grow within individual stages, it would have to be somewhere in the middle of the range (so it wouldn't look weird growing from Child or to Young Adult/Adult) and is thus [[Acceptable Breaks From Reality|reasonably]] justified.
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* ''[[Solatorobo]]'' seems to want us to believe [[Petting Zoo People]] grow a foot between nineteen and twenty. Of the characters with given ages and heights, the teenagers are all 160 cm/5'3" or less and the adults are 170 cm/5'7" or more. This can't even be justified by breed: Opéra, a Russian blue cat, is taller than her two servants, Gren the kishu inu and Calua the ocelot.
▲== [[Web Comics]] ==
* ''[[Piled Higher and Deeper|PHD]]'' takes this trope even further. One graduate student acquires a posse of tiny ''undergraduates''.▼
▲* ''[[PHD]]'' takes this trope even further. One graduate student acquires a posse of tiny ''undergraduates''.
* The ''[[Homestuck]]'' kids are 13, but are about half the height of their adult guardians.
** However their regular appearances are not supposed to be realistic, and the guardians' appearances are more an effect of how they kids perceive them than actual true appearance. When shown in "Hero Mode", they are significantly taller.
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** This becomes more egregrious when we see {{spoiler|the nearly 16-year old Alpha kids}} standing at the same height.
== [[Web Original]] ==▼
▲== Web Original ==
* Inverted in ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]'''s fourth version; most male characters turned out to be around six feet, which is pretty tall for a teenager. The girls, however, seem to have fairly normal heights in comparison. This, of course, has been [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshade hung]] both in and out of character.
== [[Western Animation]] ==▼
▲== Western Animation ==
* Straddling the line between this and [[Artists Are Not Architects]], even 15- and 16-year old boys in ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'' find themselves more than half a head shorter than almost all but the oldest and most bent over adults. This is most obvious in when Hakoda is onscreen. He's clearly shown to be about average when compared to the other Water Tribe men, and he's more than a head taller than his son (15 or above), daughter (14 or above), and Zuko (16 or above).
** It seems like the sequel, ''[[The Legend of Korra]]'', is [[Art Evolution|averting this]].
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* Averted in ''[[Total Drama Island]]'', where almost all the teens are taller than the adult host Chris, which is [[Lampshaded]] by Beth ("wow, you're much shorter in real life!"). The few adults mentioned on the show are usually the same height as the average height teens, with the exception of [[Scary Black Man|Chef Hatchet]].
* Most of the 14-year olds in ''[[Danny Phantom]]'' are ridiculously short for their age in comparison to their parents. All except bullies Dash and Kwan who are both at least as tall as Maddie Fenton. Danielle is an even worse example: apparently twelve years old and she's ''[[Artistic Age|half the height]]'' of Danny himself.
** This is also present in ''[[The Fairly
* Averted in ''[[Generator Rex]]''; the main character is 15 years old and at a realistic height for a teen his age. He's almost the exact same height as Dr. Holiday and only ''slightly'' shorter than Six, who are both adults.
* ''[[American Dad]]'': both Hayley and Steve are far shorter than their parents. Works for Steve since he's a freshman in highschool, but Hayley's in college.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Youngsters]]
▲[[Category:Teens Are Short]]
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