Age-Appropriate Angst: Difference between revisions

 

Often [[Truth in Television]]. Keep in mind, also, that this trope is ''extremely'' culturally subjective, and affected by [[Values Dissonance]].

 

 

** {{spoiler|Sister Kate}} is another good example --being an older character, their greatest personal tragedy in the manga is a demotion due to their trust in a character that later proves incredibly destructive, and in the anime it's the loss of {{spoiler|Rosette Christopher}}, who they're something of a surrogate parent to.

* Negi Springfield of ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' is an odd case. He's ten years old and witness his [[Angst What Angst|entire remaining family in the village he grew up in]] [[Taken for Granite|turned to stone]] at age four, now frequently ending up in life-threatening situations, including being run through with a sharpened rock spear and having his left arm sliced off (he had it reattached with [[Magic Antidote|magic medicine]]). Despite it all, he shrugs off everything that happens as a way of overcoming weakness and [[The Pollyanna|still likes to remain happy with his]] [[True Companions]]. The rest of the cast tell him he should act more like a kid and stop putting himself in such dangerous situations. He acknowledges his friend Anya as being stronger in this regard than him, given her [[Fiery Redhead|fiery personality]].

* Some speculate that this has contributed to some of the hatedom for Shinji Ikari in viewers of the English dub of ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]''. In the original Japanese version, he is voiced by a woman, [[Megumi Ogata]], and his voice sounds like that of a prepubescent child. In English, he is voiced by a man, [[Spike Spencer]], and sounds more like a mid-puberty teenage boy. The theory is that audiences are more tolerant of angst when they hear the voice of a child than that of a more masculine, older-sounding voice, even though the scripts between the two versions don't differ significantly in their portrayal of the character.

** In the ''[[Rebuild of Evangelion (Anime)|Rebuild of Evangelion]]'' English dubs, recorded more than a decade later, Spencer pitches his voice noticeably higher. It's especially apparent when comparing his lines in the first scenes with their equivalents in TV episode 1, when the English VAs were just getting the feel of the characters.

* In ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)|Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'', Dawn's whininess and kleptomania are considered severely obnoxious, but when you consider she's a 15 year old girl whose mother and sister died, and then her sister comes back completely depressed and incapable of taking care of her, and THEN her pseudo foster moms (Willow and Tara) break up, and then one of them '''DIES''' and the other tries to kill her, her behavior seems rather understandable. This is compounding the fact that her parents divorced when she was 8 or 9, she knows her sister is going to die young, she lives with the fact that she could easily become demon prey to fuck with or bait Buffy, Buffy seems to not give a damn about this, and more. The icing on the cake is that at 14, she finds out that she's {{spoiler|a magical construct who's only existed for six months, that all of her memories are false, and that the people she loves the most knew this and didn't tell her}}. The fact that she hasn't snapped and killed them all or become a serial killer is actually pretty surprising.

* Roundly averted in ''[[How I Met Your Mother (TV)|How I Met Your Mother]]'', where {{spoiler|Marshall's dad dies at the beginning of season six}} and the character in question is allowed to continue grieving about it for the entire rest of the season. The grieving is also presented from an adult perspective, since it {{spoiler|prompts him to wonder if he's doing something meaningful with his life.}} Also averted with respect to Barney's mommy and daddy issues -- what, on other characters in other shows, would seem pathetic, is one of the very few sources of sympathy for the often-sociopathic/[[The Casanova|misogynistic]] Barney.

* This is oddly and consistently subverted in ''[[Star Trek the Next Generation (TV)|Star Trek the Next Generation]]''. Consistently, when children lose one parent, they almost never grieve or even seem to notice, but their parents are broken up about it. The most notable and baffling example is Alexander, Worf's son, who grew up not knowing his father and lost his mother soon after meeting Worf for the first time. He lost the only parent he had ever known, left the home he had grown up on (Earth), and met a stranger who was supposed to be his father; Worf lost an old girlfriend. Regardless, Worf cried, and Alexander ''comforted'' him.