Absurdly Youthful Mother/Supernatural Justifications

Examples where Time Travel, Magic, Bizarre Alien Biology or Immortality are involved

Anime and Manga

• Tenchi Muyo! has several of these, perhaps most notably Washu being Ryoko's mother, despite the fact that Washu actually looks younger than Ryoko. In actuality, while Ryoko is merely a child at 7,000 or so, Washu is, depending on who you ask, either 20,000 or older than the universe. She cheats via magical scientific age modification.
• RahXephon has Quon, Ayato's "mom", who has been kept in stasis. Making her the same age as he is, and about alf the age of his twin brother Itsuki (Ayato too was kept in a kind of stasis)
• Lyrical Nanoha has Hayate and the Wolkenritter, Hayate acts as a mother figure at age nine, while the Wolkenritter are likely centuries old
  • Their "official" ages in A's, most likely determined by physical appearance, are 8 for Vita, 19 for Signum and 22 for Shamal. Zafira seems to pose as the family dog.
• In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, it's revealed in the TIPS/ Rei OVA that Hanyuu, who looks about anywhere from 8-12, in fact had a daughter way back when. She was an adult when she had her child in life but appears as a young girl in order to get Rika to better relate with her.
• In Dragon Ball GT, Goku is de-aged to childhood as the result of the Dragonballs, making him approximately the same age as his granddaughter, 10-year-old Pan.
  • Even before that, Goku was looking young to be the father of his professor son Gohan but this is because Saiyans remain in their prime longer than humans. Neither Bulma nor Chi Chi are thrilled, and you can guess how the latter reacts to her husband's further de-aging.
    • Also, Goku's age was stilted by about 8 years (which is about the difference between Goku and Vegeta's dates of birth to begin with) due to time spent dead.
• Moka's mother in Rosario to Vampire is well over 200, but looked like she was in her early twenties. Justified, since her species are said to be immortal. Her daughter really is 17, though.
• Mito from Space Pirate Mito looks like she's around 5 or 6 years old, while her son is only about 15 when the series starts. Turns out she's Really a few thousand year-old alien who had a child with a human.

Comic Books

• In one Sandman volume it's remarked that Orpheus' mother doesn't seem old enough to be his mother. This is understandable, since she is Calliope, an immortal muse from Greek myth. Less understandable is that despite being the child of Dream of the Endless and Calliope, Orpheus seems to be aging normally for a human...
  • That's because the Ancient Greeks weren't big on Mendelian genetics. You could be the son of a god and a nymph and still be a mortal man, albeit with a cool pedigree to boast about.
• Cable from X Men (picture above) is about twice the biological age of both his parents, Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor; he was born in the present but was spirited away and raised in a distant future. Additionally, his mother was a clone of Jean Grey, and chronologically only a couple of years old when he was born. (It's complicated)... Just remember that he's a time traveler.
  • Same goes for X-Man (Alternate Cable. He's made from Scott and Jean's DNA by an Evilutionary Biologist, grown to adulthood, looks 20 while parents are getting toward 30) and Rachel Summers (Scott and Jean's daughter presumably through normal means, returned from a Bad Future that may or may not still occur.)
• In the Yoko Tsuno book The Three Suns of Vinea, Yok'ss alien friend Khany is reunited with her mother, who was put in suspended animation at the same age Khany is now. As a result, mother and daughter now have the same biological age, prompting the former to try to make things less awkward by insisting that Khany consider her her sister rather than her mother.
• Adam Destine of ClanDestine hasn't aged since the genie Elalyth made him invulnerable when was about twenty... eight hundred years ago. Since then, he and Elalyth have had a great many children, all of whom age normally until adulthood, then slow way down. Most of his children actually look older than him, except for the twins (twelve years old) and Samantha and maybe Dominic (who look about the same age as he does).
• From the Hulk comic, the organization known as The Pantheon is lead by centuries-old, but adolescent looking Agamemnon. His immortality kicked in while young. His many sons, grandsons and grand-grandsons looks older than him.
  • However, he usually takes the appearance of a towering old man with a long, white beard when he appears at the Pantheon.
• A popular strip in the British comic Bunty involved a scientist who invents a miraculous anti-ageing cream that turns her into a 15-year-old, forcing her to go to school with her daughter so the welfare authorities will not ask questions.

Film

• The 2011 sci-fi thriller In Time features this. The premise of the film is that humanity has discovered the technology to freeze everyone's age at 25 and now live on internal "time-clocks" which expire after a set period, and people who don't work or don't buy units of time die. The extremely wealthy can purchase enough units of time to indefinitely remain the same age for years (or even decades) - in the film's trailer, a man introduces his wife, daughter and mother-in-law, all of whom are the exact same age.

Fan Fiction

• The Neon Genesis Evangelion web comic fanfic Aki Chans Life (a slice of life/ illustrated epilogue to another, very well written, fanfic called The Second Try) has a somewhat... complicated example. Aki the daughter of Asuka and Shinji, conceived after the events of the third impact was born when her parents were about 16 or so. Pretty young to begin with. Four years pass, then everyone was swept back in time and her parents returned to the age they were in the anime (14) while she remained unchanged (she's a very precocious 4). They still remain loving, mature parents, but the awkwardness of the whole situation is... well you get the idea.
• Another Eva fic, Nobody Dies, has two examples: the Reego and the Keiworu. The Reego are virtual constructs made by Iruel for Rei's Lotus Eater Machine, as theoretical offspring of her and Evangelion Unit 05. Unit 05 "saved" them from deletion when Iruel was defeated and now they exist as AI's in the real world, and consider Rei (who is 16) and Unit 05 (much younger) to be their parents. The Keiworu are AI copies of Kei Ayanami's mind randomized with elements of Kaworu's mind (both of them being 16), and also consider the two to be their parents.
• The Return, Sunshine comes across as one of these to Muggles due to the complicated nature of Succubae relationships (in purely chronological terms she could actually be younger than 2 of her kids).

Literature

• In the Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures novels, the Eighth Doctor at one point mentions being a grandfather—he appears to be in his mid-thirties at the time. His companion Fitz is a bit confused. He later adopts a young girl named Miranda, who ages rather normally, so he looks about forty (and claims to be thirty-six) when she's sixteen, which other characters see as slightly unusual. But after she leaves to have her own life and they're later reunited, several decades have passed since the last time they met, so she actually looks older than he does.

Live Action TV

• The main character of New Amsterdam is 400 years old but looks 35 (the age at which he became immortal via magical means); he sometimes seeks advice from one of his still-living sons, who is a naturally-aging 65-year-old.
• Takeru Sato, the lead actor of Kamen Rider Den-O, left the franchise after the TV series; so for future movies and spin-offs, they de-aged Ryotaro into an 11 or 12-year-old boy, making him younger than his grandson Kotaro who is around 18.
  • Due to the characters being taken from different points in their timelines, 19-year-old Yuto Sakurai is around the same age as his daughter, Hana. Hana's mother, Airi, is in her late 20s and thus only a decade or so older than Hana.
  • Thanks to time travel in Kamen Rider Kiva, father and son Otoya and Wataru meet when they are 23 and 18 years old respectively. In the finale, Wataru meets his own teenage son from the future.
    • Kiva also features Wataru and Taiga's mother Maya who, being a Fangire, doesn't age at the same rate as a human and looks around 20 years old; appearing younger than Taiga, who is in his mid-to-late 20s.
• In Rentaghost, ghosts manifest as they age they were when they died. So Hubert Davenport's mother, who died in her twenties, looks much younger than her son, who died when he was much older (his late fifties or early sixties).
• In Angel, the title character's son Connor is kidnapped as an infant and trapped in Another Dimension where time passes much more rapidly, so when he reappears a few months later- from the perspective of the other characters- he is already in his teens. Angel also only looks young; as an immortal vampire, he is Really Three Hundred Years Old.
• Doctor Who takes this to insane levels, where, due to a mixture of time travel, Regeneration and slower aging, Melody Pond is physically in her 40s for much of the series (though chronologically at least a decade older by her River Song incarnation]]), while her parents are physically in their 20s (though mentally, her father is technically almost 2000).
• Xena was somewhere in her 20s/30s when she had her daughter Eve. Shortly after Eve's birth, Xena was frozen in ice for two decades. When she emerges unaged, she and Eve look the same age - and physically, that's almost the case.
• In Torchwood: Children of Earth, the immortal Jack's daughter Alice is upset that she looks older than him.
• Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger: Asuka and Mahoro are both around their early 20s, but due to their infant daughter being used as a host for the soul of the Big Bad, she first appears as a child of around seven and then a young woman in her late teens, while her parents remain the same age.

Theater

• In the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Iolanthe, the hero Strephon is half-fairy. Fairies are unaging and Stephron has a hard time explaining to his beloved that these nubile women he is seen embracing are, in fact, his mother and his aunts, all of whom look younger than him.

I wouldn't say a word that could be reckoned as injurious But to find a mother younger than her son is very curious

Video Games

• In Touhou, Sanae Kochiya is a distant descendant of Froggy Goddess Suwako Moriya. The fact that Suwako actually looks younger than Sanae is what makes it creepy.
• From Tales of Symphonia, Kratos has been physically been around 28 for 4,000 years, which helps him hide the fact that he is Lloyd's father from the child, or else it would have appeared that he had fathered him at the age of 11.
• Golden Sun's player characters, along with Alex and Kraden, were all exposed to age-slowing amounts of Alchemy at the end of The Lost Age. So thirty years later, in Dark Dawn, the former player characters all appear to be in their mid-to-late twenties, with teenage or young adult children. Alex was exposed to more of Alchemy's power than anybody else and is basically immortal: The only reason he looks older than his child at all is because the kid in question doesn't look nineteen.
• Toyed with in two Fire Emblem games:
  • In Fire Emblem Awakening, the Second Gens are the First Generation's Kids from the Future, coming from an Ylisse that was taken over and destroyed by Grima. Save for Chrom's daughter Lucina, their younger selves from this Ylisse haven't been born yet.
  • In Fire Emblem Fates, the Second Gens were born in the present, but then were sent to Pocket Dimensions for their own safety. And since time flows faster in said dimensions, when they come into the plot they go from babies or little kids to teenagers. (Save for the Kanas and maybe Midori, who are the youngest-looking ones)

Visual Novels

• Tsugumi in Ever 17 doesn't look much older than her sixteen-year-old children, as she stopped aging at seventeen. You's mother is a more conventional really-young-looking parent... because her "daughter" is really a clone of herself that she had made when she was diagnosed with a terminal illness in her teens, and You'haru stopped aging too, at the age of twenty.

Web Comics

• You might not suspect it, but Drowtales' Queen Diva is a great-great-great (times x) grandma and well over 1000 years old by the time the story starts, which isn't unusual since fae (dark elves, drow, drowussu, etc.) stop aging at the human equivalent of 30 years old, so parents often end up looking the same age as their children and vice-versa. Additionally, Diva's Fusion Dance, Ragini/Liriel, makes her look about 12 once she fully manifests, which leads to a hilariously awkward moment where Diva meets two of her grandchildren and looks the same age as her granddaughter, to the point that Chrys'tel's clothes (from 22 chapters earlier) fit her perfectly.
• In Sailor Sun, 20 year old Bay Smith alternatively plays mother to two versions of her daughter Brady Honey Smith that were snatched from alternate futures: 18 year old Honey and kindergartner/preschooler Brady.
• In Homestuck, in every session of Sburb, it is predestined that the players will all really be paradox clones created by one of the players during that session. While this process isn't explicitly shown in the Trolls' session (though the end result is), in the kids' session, we see that John first created Nanna Egbert, Grandpa Harley, Bro Strider, and Mom Lalonde and then created the children themselves by combining this quartet pairwise, thereby making them essentially just a few minutes younger than their biological parents, whom in most cases were also their acting parents due to having been sent to different points in time. John, however, is quite a bit older than his "father", who is actually his half-brother. On top of that, if you consider creating the paradox clones to be a form of parenthood, this means that John is, at age 13, either a father of eight or a father of four and a grandfather of four, or both, depending on your perspective as to whether the second generation should be considered children as well or grandchildren. In short: Stable Time Loops and genetics should never mix.
• Nina and Layla's mom in Eerie Cuties does not look like could have had 13 children. Justified in that she's a vampire. (Vampires can reproduce in this verse the same as humans.)
• In Order of the Stick, when Roy meets his mother in the afterlife, he doesn't recognize her because she's no older than he is. His father, meanwhile, looks like an old man. Sara explains that his father always was an old man at heart, while she thinks of herself as a young woman still.

Western Animation

• In Mary Shelley's Frankenhole, Frankenstein and Elizabeth's two sons, Heinrich and Gustav, are doddering, senile old men while Victor and Elizabeth, due to an immortality potion, are still physically young adults. There was an episode where it was wondered if they should let their kids die.

---

---

Back to Absurdly Youthful Mother