Happy 15th, Far Out There!
…the first and foremost implication she resents is ANY AND ALL SUGGESTION THAT THIS PAGE MIGHT CONSTITUTE A DEFINITIVE AND CONCRETE STATEMENT REGARDING THE AGE OF LAYLA OR ANY OTHER MAJOR CHARACTER IN FAR OUT THERE. Cos it doesn’t. I mean, yeah, she’s clearly a teenager, so that GENERAL part is correct, but I still refuse to pin anybody down to a specific number that I’d have to keep straight in terms of any broader timelines. So there.
But yeah, happy birthday to us! And if this little celebration wasn’t enough partying, TOMORROW is a special Valentines page! I know, I was debating whether to do one or the other, but then I got on a roll going into the weekend and wound up drawing both. So tune back in Tuesday for more!
Isn’t Layla supposed to be roughly 17, if not 18, in story? Trigger’s supposed to be in his early teens, say 12+, so he’s young enough that his innocence from living isolated in an underground bunker isn’t necessarily considered odd, but old enough that him crushing on Skye isn’t odd, nor is him being crushed on by similar-aged girls.
Layla, meanwhile, is supposed to be a few years older than Trigger. Old enough that being considered attractive by adults in or beyond their 20’s isn’t considered disturbingly creepy, and old enough that striking off without support isn’t completely unreasonable. And old enough that her effectively being Trigger’s point-of-human-contact while he was growing up isn’t completely irresponsible parenting on behalf of her parents.
Layla being 17~18, rather than any younger, would also mean that her impressive chest size isn’t completely unreasonable for her age, even if it’ll always be impressive for her height. At 16 her chest-size would be possible, but unlikely. At 15 or younger, her chest-size is just plain unreasonable, and an indicator that she will have them surgically removed or suffer SIGNIFICANT back pain in the future.
All roughly true, yet at the same time she’s also young enough for characters like Ichabod to treat her like a literal child on occasion. Thus, my “this character is whatever age the current joke requires to work” stance.
Also, just to point out: the Far Out There universe DOES seem to treat it as comparatively normal for children to take on adult-level responsibilities in certain situations. Whether that’s because future education is good enough for very young people to become very smart very fast, or just a sign that a lot of future adults are just incredibly immature and incompetent, remains to be seen (…because, again, the REAL reason is because sometimes it’s just funny to, say, have Ichabod’s boss be a little kid. It all boils down to what makes the joke work.)
Just for the heck of it, here’s the list I made up many years back that Blitz semi-sort-of-confirmed-vaguely was at least somewhat close to the relative ages of the characters, maybe (I think that’s the best we’re ever going to nail him down…)
2 +-1 Principal Baby (apparent age)
5 +-1 Bridget & Alphonse (apparent age)
6 +-1 Megaweapon
10 +-1 Avatar (apparent age)
13 +-1 Trigger, May, SSJHC4
14 +-1 Jenna
15 +-1 Marshall
15 +-1 Kevin
16 +-1 Layla
17 +-1 Frank
18 +-1 Tabitha
22 +-3 Skye
31 +-3 Eric, Patti
38 +-3 Mariska, Ichabod
43 +-5 Principal Baby (actual age)
OLD+-as dirt Cap’n Crosby
????? Avatar (actual age)
?? +-1 Completely indeterminate(actual age): Stilez, Tax, Bridget & Alphonse
I’m not going to ask Vengeance his age! YOU ask him!
While you’re still right about not pining me down to any specific individual numbers, the general character-to-character age ratios are pretty spot on… with ONE notable exception. I’ve always envisioned Skye being of comparable age to Layla and Tabitha, old enough for it to be that much more obvious that Trigger’s got no chance, but still just close enough that HE’D not notice it.
Oh, and while I know this hasn’t come up in an actual comic, I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Tabitha wants Bridget & Alphonse to grow up like normal kids. Whether that means they actually “GROW” grow, or if she just makes periodic adjustments to make them bigger, remains to be seen. Still, it’s for sure that they’re not older than they look… though it IS up for debate how much YOUNGER than they look they may be. They do seem to be bigger than infants in those flashback pictures when Tabitha’s “activating” them…
based on them not looking all that much younger int he flashaback, and Tabitha looking not much younger either, and assuing their pseudo-aging at a normal human rate, and that they were “old” enough when created to be running around actively doing stuff, etc they can’t be much more than about 2 years old chronologically. Which brings up the question of how they seem to have celebrated Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentines day, etc at least a dozen times 😉 I guess their planet must have a very short year…. (Though since everyone seems to celebrate simultaneously, it looks like Christmas is still celebrated on some strange random 365 day cycle…nobody is really sure why. Maybe Mr. Van der Welt knows.)
I thought for sure I remembered you saying Skye was older.
Also, a teenage boy NEVER notices that he’s got no chance 🙂
I can see Skye being at least a BIT older than Layla, but I feel like if she’s TOO old, it becomes weird if she’s not willing to be the grown up, sit the kid down, and say “Look, kid. No.” For the current gag to continue, Skye needs to be awkward enough to not really know what to do, and that feels like a very teenage state of mind to me.
regarding kids having adult responsibilities in FOT – I’d sort of nitpick that by saying that for most of human history, what we’d now consider kids very frequently had what we’d now consider adult responsibilities, heck some kids were monarchs of countries (albeit heavily ‘advised’)! So it’s actually NOW that’s the oddity, the FOT future has just returned to humanity’s “normal”.
That’s actually true in TWO ways. On the one hand, it does indeed play into the notion of younger people taking on more responsibilities than we’d consider normal. But at the same time, the very fact that our current society keep prolonging adolescence out longer and longer also hints at what I was saying about certain adults in Far Out There being so childish that just letting actual children take adult jobs seems… not a “good” idea, exactly, but no worse than the alternative.
I will say that the adults and children in FOT often have a difference of the importance of their responsibilities, not the rate of their responsibilities. And that we don’t actually know the average lifespan of those in FOT, but it’s likely longer than roughly 100 years (max, if you’re healthy), given that it’s a Sci-Fi Setting. As in, Ichabod himself could be 200 and still the physical equivalent of a man in his 20’s due to life extensions so standard there’s nobody without them. Cap’n Crosby could be 3000 years old to look as old as he reportedly does, or been born before some of those life extensions became as commonplace as they currently are (and still be 3000 years old).
Avatar, as Avatar, is probably younger than Ichabod, but likely not by much. Hell, if anyone knows when that Mad Scientist Convention that resulted in the research that turned her into the Avatar we know happened, we can know the maximum age she could possibly be. Assuming that she has purely experienced standard temporal progression. She can’t be all that old for her to be famous, even if only in the Mad Scientist Circles.
Well, I CAN confirm that Avatar’s not gone falling through any timey wimey distortions to cause her timeline to be out of sync with anybody else (to a degree that it would actually matter).
I can also confirm that, as a general rule, it safe to assume that characters like Ichabod are more or less around the general age we’d assume “normal” people in their place would be. If I’m not clever enough to keep things straight where normal aging rates are concerned, introducing the possibility of wide-spread age jiggery-pokery without any obvious visual clues would just be chaos.
That said, I’m fully up for using the scifi setting to have SOME characters be older than you’d think. However, it’s safe to assume that they’ll either have clear visual abnormalities to get the point across visually right away (like, say, Cap’n Crosby wearing a full-body robo-suit) or make a point of clearly addressing it dialog well before it has a chance to actually become important. (like… well, you’ll see 😀 )
I was more thinking that the aging thing was a universal constant, and a reason why the main cast can go through as many adventures as The Simpsons without seeming to age beyond small things like Trigger’s Hair rapidly growing. Something like 80 Earth Years in FOT is the equivalent physical age of 20 on Earth. Potentially to the point where the “Standard” InterGalactic Year is 4 times as long as an Earth’s Year, or some other, higher, equivalent.
This would create a “best of both worlds” situation. Meaning that, despite Ichabod being in his 20’s, he’s lived long enough that, if he had been on Earth, he would be considered to be in his 80’s or older (with an unnaturally youthful body). This would also allow for people to stay the same age for extended periods & numerous more adventures without it being considered odd that their hair has grown or that they haven’t aged significantly despite the fact that it seems like a few years would have passed for so many events to have occurred. All while allowing the character’s “age” to be comparable to their appearance, due to their “age” being based on the Intergalatic Standard Year rather than our much shorter Earth Year.
Do you like this reasonable idea, or are you going to reject it purely because you feel you’ll forget about this potential piece of triva?
Oh, I think stuff like this all the time. Like, how can there even be standardized concepts like “days” in a setting where everybody’s spread out across planets with different rotational cycles or on ships in the middle of deep space. Or how, given the distances traveled, there must be some kind of faster-than-light travel that opens up all sorts of questions about relativistic discontinuity in the passage of time.
Stuff like this is why Star Trek came up with the idea of using “stardates” and downplaying the use of real calendars, because a “startdate” is something they made up and can mean whatever stretch of time they want!
In the spirit of nitpicking, I should mention that 16, not 15, would be the “middle” of the teenage years – with 13,14, and 15 below, and 17, 18, and 19 above. Due to the weirdness of the English language, eleven and twelve don’t qualify as “teenage” years.
As far as Layla’s chest size, I have a vague memory of seeing a transcript for a sound bite on some website that hosted various sound bites (which might have since been taken down or something) where one character is saying to another that a girl they’re looking at has breast implants, the second says she’s too young, and the first says they have them done at birth – I don’t think that would really work, so maybe the first character was just messing with the second character’s head. No idea what movie that was from, though (I might want to avoid the movie if I can find out). In Layla’s case, she could be wearing a padded bra for all I could tell.
I mean, from what we’ve seen about the Far Out There universe, starting cosmetic surgery at birth hardly seems off the table for certain people. (Granted, I can confirm Layla is unaugmented, but still)
Birth?! Ha! If you’re only starting at birth, you’re at least 9 months behind! Cosmetic ‘surgery’ is all done at the genetic level before conception, or if you’re waiting until the last minute maybe right after (since conception is probably in a test tube anyway) when you’re still a single cell. Only POOR people and such wait until after birth! (from Astrid’s handbook 😉
To be fair, Layla most certainly is ‘augmented’. Just artistically instead of cosmetically – I think she got that right about the same time Tabitha took that growth formula that made her 2ft taller. 😀
…you mean the formula that slightly rubbed off into Trigger’s hair and caused it to suddenly become at least a foot longer out of nowhere? 🙂
Numerically, and from a nitpicking standard, that’s true, but societally it seems to me that “teenager” is far more used simply as a euphemism for “puberty/adolescence” [from pubmed.gov for reference:”Puberty may begin from age 8.0 to 14.9 years for females and from age 9.7 to 14.1 years for males and is complete by age 12.4 to 16.8 years for females and by age 13.7 to 17.9 years for males.”] This seems right to me because I rarely remember myself or my peers really being referred to as teenagers at 18 or 19, nor did we really think of ourselves as such. So, from that standpoint, some folks are teenagers a lot earlier than others and finish a lot earlier or later. And it may very well be argued, for that matter, that a large percentage, particularly of the male species, never stop being teenagers. 🙂
Considering the already in RL absurdly early age that some extremely creepily misguided parents are apparently giving their adolescent kids implants as “birthday presents”, it seems likely that in a future where people have variously bioengineered themselves a squidoids or catpersons or whatever, that cosmetic “surgery” is only a figure of speech and parents bioengineer their kids appearance long before they’re born. At the very least, if some, like Astrid, say, want to purchase an enhanced look, they likely take a pill or injection of nannites that go to a certain part of the body and the replicate. Surgery is something you see in ancient history movies!
There are parents IRL who give adolescent children breast implants as birthday presents? I hadn’t heard about that before, and I have to agree that’s creepy – surgical enhancement like that should be the person’s own choice, rather than forced upon them.
As far as bioengineering, that could probably also do something to prevent the back pain issues Darius Drake brought up.
Also, Happy 15th!! 😀
deleted duplicate post