Timeline and age confusions
Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2017 7:40 pm
I have read this wonderful web comic off and on for the past seven or more years. I say off and on, but I took an unintended break at the end of what I thought was 2012, but when upon rediscovering the site and doing an archive dive I found that the last pages I remembered were from 2011. Weird. Time does strange things around here.
And because time does strange things around here, and because I have just in the past week or so completed a full archive dive from the beginning I must bring up some confusion in my brain that, as far as I can tell, nobody else has mentioned, nor has there been any mention of Paul trying to fix his readers confusion. My confusion revolves around the relative ages of Castella and Astali, and the 156 weeks later time-jump.
Soooo….let me get started and fill you folks in on my confusion:
When we first meet Astali, she is 15. How do we know? She tells us. When we first see Castella, we are informed that she is extremely excited about being in Kindergarten and shortly after that she will be entering First Grade. This pegs her age at about 5 or 6 (depending on when she was “born”). So a ten year age difference. Ok, good to know.
The next time we are given a definite age for Astali is her Christmas gettogether with Nadette, where they managed to put down five quarts of ‘special’ eggnog. We learn that they are both sixteen, thus legal to drink alcohol in the para-world.
Then we have birthday party that Dylan orchestrates for Astali. This is her seventeenth birthday, and also the last time we actually hear of her age before the time-jump. So, we have a time-jump of three years, and for some reason everyone but Astali and Nadette seem to have jumped forward in age by three years. Astali is getting ready to go to college, but instead of being 20 due to the jump, we are still being shown things that make me think she is, at most, 18.
Now to Pickle’s age. When they are fist established, there is a ten-year difference between her and Astali. So, after the time-jump, Castella should be at most 10. Yet we are given an awkward young tween who’s just hitting puberty. Given the material, I would have to place her age at 12-13. Unfortunately, we are not given any indication of what grade she is in school, as this would allow us to peg her current age much more precisely. I would almost go so far as to say that in the current story she could be as old as 14. I say this due to all of her friends being much more physically mature (like Scarlett), and starting after-school clubs like I would expect to see in junior-high/high school. Yet, if she is 14, that should put Astali at 24!
Then there is the complication of the back-story that Paul has established in 2016 for the earliest known interactions between Astali and Castella. In them we see a very young Astali, who is ‘reading’ her books in the safe-room of her house. By her vocabulary, size, and actions this version of Astali looks to be no more than four! And Castella is still a small sprout (though apparently very powerful). So if this is to be believed, there is only a four year difference between the two sisters – despite what was established much earlier in the comic. However, this much smaller age difference between the girls makes the current 18-19 year old Astali that we see, and the new apparent age of Castella.
And all this leads up to me asking, so which age difference is correct? Astali and Nadette were going out for a ‘social outing’ just before the ‘156 weeks later’ placard, and immediately afterward, Astali is stating how she just managed to survive a social outing. Everyone in her age range is finishing senior year of school and entering college, and at one point we were told that Astali was a junior. So a three year time skip doesn’t quite work there either.
Have we ever gotten any information from Paul as to why he did the time-skip, other than to get to more interesting stories for his characters? Do any of you think we will get an explanation as to why some of them aged and others didn’t?
And lastly, do any of you helpful folks have any ideas for fitting these timey-wimey shenanigans into my brain? Because I just cannot wrap my mind around the fact that we seem to have a time-jump for some, but not others. And that would involve time travel, which I think Paul is avoiding at this point.
And because time does strange things around here, and because I have just in the past week or so completed a full archive dive from the beginning I must bring up some confusion in my brain that, as far as I can tell, nobody else has mentioned, nor has there been any mention of Paul trying to fix his readers confusion. My confusion revolves around the relative ages of Castella and Astali, and the 156 weeks later time-jump.
Soooo….let me get started and fill you folks in on my confusion:
When we first meet Astali, she is 15. How do we know? She tells us. When we first see Castella, we are informed that she is extremely excited about being in Kindergarten and shortly after that she will be entering First Grade. This pegs her age at about 5 or 6 (depending on when she was “born”). So a ten year age difference. Ok, good to know.
The next time we are given a definite age for Astali is her Christmas gettogether with Nadette, where they managed to put down five quarts of ‘special’ eggnog. We learn that they are both sixteen, thus legal to drink alcohol in the para-world.
Then we have birthday party that Dylan orchestrates for Astali. This is her seventeenth birthday, and also the last time we actually hear of her age before the time-jump. So, we have a time-jump of three years, and for some reason everyone but Astali and Nadette seem to have jumped forward in age by three years. Astali is getting ready to go to college, but instead of being 20 due to the jump, we are still being shown things that make me think she is, at most, 18.
Now to Pickle’s age. When they are fist established, there is a ten-year difference between her and Astali. So, after the time-jump, Castella should be at most 10. Yet we are given an awkward young tween who’s just hitting puberty. Given the material, I would have to place her age at 12-13. Unfortunately, we are not given any indication of what grade she is in school, as this would allow us to peg her current age much more precisely. I would almost go so far as to say that in the current story she could be as old as 14. I say this due to all of her friends being much more physically mature (like Scarlett), and starting after-school clubs like I would expect to see in junior-high/high school. Yet, if she is 14, that should put Astali at 24!
Then there is the complication of the back-story that Paul has established in 2016 for the earliest known interactions between Astali and Castella. In them we see a very young Astali, who is ‘reading’ her books in the safe-room of her house. By her vocabulary, size, and actions this version of Astali looks to be no more than four! And Castella is still a small sprout (though apparently very powerful). So if this is to be believed, there is only a four year difference between the two sisters – despite what was established much earlier in the comic. However, this much smaller age difference between the girls makes the current 18-19 year old Astali that we see, and the new apparent age of Castella.
And all this leads up to me asking, so which age difference is correct? Astali and Nadette were going out for a ‘social outing’ just before the ‘156 weeks later’ placard, and immediately afterward, Astali is stating how she just managed to survive a social outing. Everyone in her age range is finishing senior year of school and entering college, and at one point we were told that Astali was a junior. So a three year time skip doesn’t quite work there either.
Have we ever gotten any information from Paul as to why he did the time-skip, other than to get to more interesting stories for his characters? Do any of you think we will get an explanation as to why some of them aged and others didn’t?
And lastly, do any of you helpful folks have any ideas for fitting these timey-wimey shenanigans into my brain? Because I just cannot wrap my mind around the fact that we seem to have a time-jump for some, but not others. And that would involve time travel, which I think Paul is avoiding at this point.