Math is Hard! (age question)

[darkrose]

How old is Loghain at the beginning of Origins? How old was Maric when he disappeared? (I know DG has confirmed that he's dead, but for fic-writing purposes, as far as I'm concerned he's only comic-book dead.)

The inconsistency of dating between novels and game makes my poor little non-mathematically-inclined brain hurt.

Comments

[niniane]

The Calling is sort of weird in that it has a typo. So it's either 10 years after TST, or 15 years. I think you're right, though, in that the typo was confirmed as a typo (that was one weird BSN thread...), so it's actually supposed to be 10. In which case Alistair = 20. On the other hand, on that thread, Gaider also confirmed that Alistair was supposed to be 22-25, so...yeah, I give up. No one has any clue how old Alistair is...

I figure that Eamon must either have either aged a lot from the poison, just had bad genetics...or, maybe it's the beard. You know, beards make people look older sometimes...especially if they're gray...but yeah, I do find it kind of goofy that Eamon is almost as close in age to Anora as he is to Loghain.

[klarabella]

Gaider never confirmed any age officially, I thought. The only sort of confirmation I'm aware of is when two guys asked him via private message and he answered that Alistair is supposed to be 21.

That fits nicely with the Fiona theory and the fact that Alistair spend half of his life at the chantry without becoming a full templar.

I would never take the head morphs into consideration. They don'Ät put too much effort into them. Loghain looks way too young, Eamon too old, Teagan looks about right, Alistair too old, Isolde too old, and so on.

[niniane]

Yeah, I agree that the head morphs are pretty off. Loghain looks too young, Eamon does look too old, Isolde actually looks too young to me (you figure that she's about 30), as does Anora (who is also supposed to be about 30). Alistair def. looks closer to 30 than 20. It's kind of strange...

I think that either theory works well with Alistair spending half his life in the chantry without becoming a templar. I mean, getting the son of the king addicted to lyrium seems kind of stupid. No matter who the Mom is.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/9/index/1054532

Confirmation of the rough timeline, anyway.

[klarabella]

Someone on BSN said that Gaider originally had other plans for Katriel, her pet theory is that Alistair was originally Katriel's son. That would make im 30-ish in Dragon Age Origins. :D

[niniane]

I think that there was all kinds of crazy stuff going on. ;) To me, early 30s would sort of make sense for Alistair.

I'm still, though, going for game > books > writer comments/confirms. (Which is all debatable. All, possibly, are equally canon.) As elf-baby isn't even *confirmed* as Alistair in the book (it's just speculation), and 4 characters make references to Alistair being the son of a servant in game, I'm still leaning towards that explanation.

That said, I think that they're both valid. *shrugs* I just prefer to not make up grand conspiracies OR ret con the game over rumors that a novel kind of sort of implies. (Esp. as I hated the novel.)