stuckasmain:

You know it bothers me how people only do the “oh they’re 30 they’re so old they don’t look like high schoolers” thing for fucking Grease. They dont just focus on the story and characters and just have to make the same cut joke a million others have … like no where else has this constant age thing

This is also- kids used to look older back in the day. People look back at actual high schoolers 40s-90s and say they look 30

So which is it?

I strongly believe that humans have little if any actual ability to tell each other’s ages on sight. The variation between individual humans in terms of how they look at what age is just…. bigger than any supposed general tendencies across humanity.

And yeah, popular perception of what ages look like has probably been shaped by Hollywood movies, and how they conceptualize the way actors playing kids are supposed to look (whether actually playing their real age or not).

But I think the error it encourages isn’t a wrong portrayal of “what a particular age looks like,” it’s the whole concept that ages have standard appearances.