Thursday DE: talking bout my g-generation

[needsmoreresearch]

So my boy Hal is feeling very Old these days. How about other pups? What do they think about getting old? Are they adults and happy with it, do they want to live fast and die young? Sitting on a porch shaking a cane at kids on the lawn, smoking in the parking lot and not trusting anyone over thirty?

Comments

[bcgphoenix]

Alistair isn't going to live past fifty, thanks to the Joining all Grey Wardens undertake. It lets them fight the darkspawn, but it also slowly poisons them -- you get ten to thirty years after you chug that cup of darkspawn/archdemon blood, max. Alistair accepted this a while ago ("We all die," he says, gently, when the player-character in Origins has a minor "so I'm going to die" freakout), so he doesn't dwell on it. Mostly, as far as getting old goes, he thinks it's a little weird he may actually make it to 50, since he's not on the front lines anymore.

And, uh, my other two (Gaeta and Curtis) died at ages 28 and 35, respectively, so they have no chance of getting old! Er.

[wings_of_a_swan]

Fantine, Combeferre, and Jehan Prouvaire all died in their late twenties (or just barely into his thirties, in Combeferre's case), so they never have to worry about getting old! :D?

Combeferre and Prouvaire both have had the occasional philosophical wondering about this, especially when they consider just how long they might spend in Milliways, and they might end up with a wealth of experience but no age to show for it. Freaky!

Brienne could theoretically get old, but even without canon foreknowledge, odds don't look good. She's a knight in all but name. That means living hard, dying young, and leaving a butchered corpse. :/

[never_promised]

Bossuet was feeling old, a bit, when he was first at Milliways, but he's kind of embraced his perpetual-almost-turning-thirty status and he's feeling just about the right age.

Feuilly in some ways has been catching up on chances at personal self-definition that he never had time for and never prioritized before. It's good. He's never going to get old, being dead and all, but he'll be a more comfortable person for his Milliways time.

Hal is a sad old man of 35, it's so tragic, Viola keeps acting like he's older than her and Kids These Days try to talk to him about king stuff but they don't want to hear what he has to say.

Ursula is a character that's kind of about a kid's idealized version of being an adult: knowing what you want, living independently. She's a supporting character in a Miyazaki film, she'll probably be an awesome old lady some day.

William Douglas doesn't anticipate ever really growing up and getting out from under his father's thumb, let alone getting old. He's uh. Half right on that.

[clayforthedevil]

((Aww, Fwee.))

[angry_friendship_wolf]

Yamato: The idea of growing into adulthood is a major theme in Digimon Adventure Tri (much less so in 01 and 02, since the cast are a lot younger in those) and we're getting to see each member of the gang approach it in different ways - but two chapters/eight episodes in, Yamato's been oddly quiet on the subject, and it's really not clear what he thinks about it.

Which is a little weird, because with the exception of Takeru and Hikari (who are younger than the others and thus probably exempt from the growing-up plotline), we've gotten at least a little bit of a glimpse into how everyone's struggling with that transition. So hopefully chapter three/episodes nine through twelve will give me something in that regard.

Gabumon: I did the maths once, and the partner Digimon are literally thousands of years old, but they're all still children, and they'll always be children (except Tailmon). I somewhat doubt that Gabumon understands the concept of growing older, either: He might just think that Yamato evolved during their time apart.

Sherral: Adulthood seems to work weirdly in Ivalice, and especially in Archadia, and is tied up in notions of class and role and function.

Vaan, resident Dalmascan street vagrant and thief, is considered a child at seventeen; Larsa, Archadian prince, appears to be considered functionally an adult at age twelve - there are a few references to his being a child (Drace's remark that the Senate "believes a child emperor will be easy to control" and Cid's slightly sarcastic remarks about him being a sweet child), but even when his father's alive, this doesn't impact at all on his ability to travel freely, conduct investigations, issue commands to both Judge Magisters and sovereign heads of state, act as an international ambassador, or, indeed, declare himself (temporarily) autocrat, and later run for election as emperor.

That largely seems to be because in Archadia, authority > age, because authority > literally everything in Archadia. This seems to extend to some degree to the rest of Ivalice, because Penelo, slightly younger than Vaan but gainfully employed, is treated more like an adult than he is.

Sherral, for his part, has been considered an adult since he was fourteen, with the transition point being the day he entered basic training, and has considered himself one since then as well. He's never actually concerned himself with acting like an adult, because instead he's focused on acting like an imperial officer, because - well, more of that whole thing on how authority trumps everything in Archadia.

He also doesn't think in terms of growing older, so much? Mostly because he's incredibly goal-oriented and ambitious, and he sees his future in terms of a series of goals, and is perfectly content to grow approximately as old as he needs to to accomplish them.

Hawke: Hawke probably considered himself an adult as soon as Malcolm Hawke died, or at least considered himself more of one. As far as growing older, goes - he's fine with it, but I imagine on some level also doesn't expect to become very old. He's a mage who lives a pretty dangerous life, after all, and Thedas is not exactly the snuggly kind of place where dangerous-living mages live that long.

Although, he canonically lives until he's at least 34-35 or so, but ahahahaha, no, seriously, he will probably die a fiery, bloody death before he's in spitting distance of being old. It's possible to leave him to die in the Fade fighting a giant spider demon, and I think that kind of sets the tone for how he'll eventually go out, one way or another.

[clayforthedevil]

Joly is totally fine with being an adult, though he was only a couple years past his age of majority before he died, and he's still sort of getting used to it and still prone to bouts of feeling like he should get an Adultier Adult for some things. He'll settle into himself, but he's always going to be too excited about Progress and New Ideas to really feel "old", eternal 20-some physique aside.

Bahorel is a Wise and Experienced Elder in his mid-30s, which is way older than he ever really expected to be. He loves it, since it's old enough to be obnoxious about to his younger but still adult friends, and young enough to still annoy the really boring sort of old person. He's definitely prone to missing people and places gone, but that's grief rather than nostalgia. He's overall firmly on the side of The Kids Are All Right, and highly supports younger people giving their elders a healthy amount of disregard. It's the ciiiircle of liiiiife or something, probably!

Gringoire is almost thirty! Yes! Beating the odds! He alternates between wanting to live a long life so he'll have time to be famous and influential and a great artist and just wanting to live a long life because he really really really doesn't want to die. Either way "getting old" is a Life Goal for him. Any other age-related issue has really not crossed his mind at all yet.

[i_am_your_host]

I don't think Emcee ever envisioned himself growing old. Not with his lifestyle of sex, drugs, and liquor, and the general circumstances and time period he's in. But thanks to Milliways he has the chance to live out his life, even if it hasn't sunk in yet. He's still pretty reckless and will probably always be, and one thing for sure is that nobody gets to tell him to act his age because fuck them.

Pam wanted to become a vampire because she didn't want to grow old and diseased and die alone. That was the fate of a Victorian woman in her position, a madam of a brothel, outcast and unmarried. Immortality suits her just fine.

The problem with the Vikings show is that we don't know how old any of the Vikings are. Time has progressed in leaps and bounds already, so those dudes would be pretty freaking old by now (by medieval standards) unless canon started them in their early twenties. And being an old Viking was...not impossible, but just...difficult. You'd think they'd have all died in battle by now. But anyway! Floki might wish to die in battle in order to go to Valhalla, but if he ends up an elderly carpenter with Helga by his side, I don't think he'd be too disappointed.

[mightbeagoodone]

Steve is an odd situation. Technically he's almost a hundred years old; mentally, he feels that way sometimes. Physically, he'll be a young man in his prime for an unknown amount of time. He may not grow old; he may grow old all at once. He may outlive everyone he knows (again).

People in Furiosa's world tend to die young and violently, or live long and miserably. She doesn't expect to live long, jut given her reality, but she tries to make her time count no matter how long or short.

Sherlock plans to live forever. Or die young. It's all the same to him.

[feminine_menace]

YT hasn't really thought about it, but that's not surprising. She's a teenager: at this point in her life, she doesn't have the equipment or motivation to consider her own mortality. There's a hint in a later book by the author of YT's canon that she lives to a ripe old age, which you wouldn't expect given that she is the sort of person who skateboards in traffic.

By this time Seimei has already gotten old, died, and been deified. He's fast approaching 1,100 years old at this point, and although he doesn't look it, he definitely feels it (emotionally if not physically).

[tlvop]

Legolas is a BABY of 800, and is honestly horrified of ever having to be a grown-up. This will change somwehat in about 50 years (the time of The Hobbit) and somewhat more 50 years after that. If he knew, he'd be in mourning for it already, so I keep going "shhh, of course you'll get to party around the forest forever."

(He considers himself older than most adults he meets in Milliways, though. It's all relative.)

Chuck has been a Jaeger pilot since he was 16, and honestly has no idea how to be anything else, much less a normal grown-up. He's most comfortable with teens? He's kind of emotionally a teenager (despite dying at 21).

Clint is SO OLD, which he only accepts with the addition "but in a really attractive way," so sure, Clint. You're old and hot. He mostly subdivides adulthood into civilians vs. veterans, where neither are better except he's more willing to accept a reasonable 16 year old who reads as a veteran into "adulthood" than one who reads as a civilian.

Melinda May is a grown-up. Obviously. She's very uncomfortable around kids.

Darcy exists in the gray area between adulthood and childhood, where she wants to be treated like an adult but is veeery nervous of Doing It Wrong so will embrace the protective shield of amateur adult as long as possible. (Mostly through being prickly.)