姜維 (伯約) ▪ Jiang Wei (Boyue) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
prodigious) wrote2011-05-31 08:31 pm
prodigious) wrote2011-05-31 08:31 pm
Entry tags:
my stupid rambly teal deer on age and timeline issues.
So Maka said something on plurk about character age differences and I was kind of like AHAHAHA sob because Koei is so ridiculous about character ages in my canon to begin with, and basically this is some random crap about age in DW and why it's ridiculous and also kind of depressing.
Right, so. It has occurred to me that I should probably actually go put a disclaimer about this in my stats/permissions, because: I kind of flail when I get age questions IC. I'm not kidding when I say things are ridiculous.
DW takes place over a span of many decades. The game sometimes feels like it's making efforts to avoid calling attention to this; story mode doesn't give any dates, so it's easy to miss in some cases, but then you'll have a sudden moment where somebody says something like "many years have passed since Guandu" and you're like oh, welp.
None of the playable characters visibly age during this, at all. (Okay, one exception for Liu Shan, who appeared in one cutscene as a baby and then reappeared in the plot a couple decades later as a teenager.) In fact, Liu Shan aside, there's only one character seen aging in the entire game -- a random NPC in Shu's army (I like to call him "Shu Guy"). We know it's the same guy because he appears in every camp sequence and goes "HEY MY LORD REMEMBER ME :D" and tells you what's going on his life. Through Shu story mode, you see his portrait change from a fresh-faced young man to an old grizzled veteran, and in his last appearance he's hanging out with his two grown sons.
So we know from this guy (and from the odd offhand reference) that time is indeed passing as normal in Koei!China! It's just that nobody appears to be aging.
Obviously this is for gameplay and aesthetics reasons; with sixty-some playable characters, having the models change would be a ridiculous amount of effort. Also, having people's ages keep up with history would destroy a lot of the eye candy, and eye candy sells. (I mean, we're not getting those school uniform DLC costumes for no reason, is all I'm sayin'.)
Perspective: Jiang Wei was born in 202. The plot of DW7 ends in 263. And yes, I play him from around the end of the plot.
Koei portrays him as 19 years old, from start to finish. :')
So every time I get a "how long have you been fighting Wei/how long have you been in your position" type of question, you may have noticed that I'm really vague about it! This is because I don't want to have to try find an IC explanation for Koei and its ridiculous logic. I'm about to go (finally) add a note about that to my stats/permissions, because it really should've been there from the beginning.
The logic they use in picking the ages they portray people as is also kind of weird sometimes; i.e. Cao Cao is consistently portrayed as being in his thirties, but his son is portrayed as being twenty-seven. Don't think too hard about it. It's better that way.
Jiang Wei's always been portrayed as nineteen, through the whole series. This makes total sense in the older games; since the story used to end at Wuzhang Plains, he was still reasonably young then (albeit not as young as Koei makes him), so it plays up the whole thing about him being this young prodigy who's going to follow in Zhuge Liang's footsteps, yada yada. This makes a little less sense now that we have Jin story mode, where he should be middle-aged at the youngest, but...oh well!
Hawke has mentioned that Jiang Wei acts like an old man and he's too young for that. I kind of died laughing.
Basically for camp purposes: I just roll with the age he looks, and glaze over the historical inconsistency. If I run into a problem while threading and I can't just quietly glaze over it and keep moving, I'll ping you. It makes life easier for me if you don't hit the age/timeline questions too hard, but this is completely my problem, not yours, so I'm not hatin' if anybody does bring it up IC!
Setting aside the lolhistory problem and how I'm trying to tiptoe around it, though -- in my opinion, the age issues make Shu's plight even more obviously depressing.
There are no official ages for DW7, so the precise ages of the new playables are a mystery, which was really fun when I was trying to sort out how they'd go in CFUD apps to write that pimp post before. Judging by their looks, though, Jin mostly seems to skew older than second gen Shu. Yuanji and Zhong Hui are definitely campers. Sima Zhao is debatable (I put him somewhere 20-25), but has been apped as a counselor. The rest are definitely counselors (I count Xiahou Ba as Shu, even if the game doesn't, given that he defects one battle in). Sima Shi and Zhuge Dan are in their twenties, Deng Ai is...iunno but definitely not a camper. Guo Huai is old.
Second gen Shu, on the other hand, is mostly campers. Jiang Wei and Xing Cai are 19, Liu Shan looks about the same, Guan Ping is dead by then but also 19, so Guan Suo has to be even younger than that, Bao Sanniang is about Guan Suo's age...the only ones in their twenties are Ma Dai and Yue Ying.
So what I'm totally reading from this whole age spread is one more indication that second gen Shu is a bunch of kids who have been dumped with a legacy they can't handle by their parents.
Koeiiiiiiii. ;_;
Right, so. It has occurred to me that I should probably actually go put a disclaimer about this in my stats/permissions, because: I kind of flail when I get age questions IC. I'm not kidding when I say things are ridiculous.
DW takes place over a span of many decades. The game sometimes feels like it's making efforts to avoid calling attention to this; story mode doesn't give any dates, so it's easy to miss in some cases, but then you'll have a sudden moment where somebody says something like "many years have passed since Guandu" and you're like oh, welp.
None of the playable characters visibly age during this, at all. (Okay, one exception for Liu Shan, who appeared in one cutscene as a baby and then reappeared in the plot a couple decades later as a teenager.) In fact, Liu Shan aside, there's only one character seen aging in the entire game -- a random NPC in Shu's army (I like to call him "Shu Guy"). We know it's the same guy because he appears in every camp sequence and goes "HEY MY LORD REMEMBER ME :D" and tells you what's going on his life. Through Shu story mode, you see his portrait change from a fresh-faced young man to an old grizzled veteran, and in his last appearance he's hanging out with his two grown sons.
So we know from this guy (and from the odd offhand reference) that time is indeed passing as normal in Koei!China! It's just that nobody appears to be aging.
Obviously this is for gameplay and aesthetics reasons; with sixty-some playable characters, having the models change would be a ridiculous amount of effort. Also, having people's ages keep up with history would destroy a lot of the eye candy, and eye candy sells. (I mean, we're not getting those school uniform DLC costumes for no reason, is all I'm sayin'.)
Perspective: Jiang Wei was born in 202. The plot of DW7 ends in 263. And yes, I play him from around the end of the plot.
Koei portrays him as 19 years old, from start to finish. :')
So every time I get a "how long have you been fighting Wei/how long have you been in your position" type of question, you may have noticed that I'm really vague about it! This is because I don't want to have to try find an IC explanation for Koei and its ridiculous logic. I'm about to go (finally) add a note about that to my stats/permissions, because it really should've been there from the beginning.
The logic they use in picking the ages they portray people as is also kind of weird sometimes; i.e. Cao Cao is consistently portrayed as being in his thirties, but his son is portrayed as being twenty-seven. Don't think too hard about it. It's better that way.
Jiang Wei's always been portrayed as nineteen, through the whole series. This makes total sense in the older games; since the story used to end at Wuzhang Plains, he was still reasonably young then (albeit not as young as Koei makes him), so it plays up the whole thing about him being this young prodigy who's going to follow in Zhuge Liang's footsteps, yada yada. This makes a little less sense now that we have Jin story mode, where he should be middle-aged at the youngest, but...oh well!
Hawke has mentioned that Jiang Wei acts like an old man and he's too young for that. I kind of died laughing.
Basically for camp purposes: I just roll with the age he looks, and glaze over the historical inconsistency. If I run into a problem while threading and I can't just quietly glaze over it and keep moving, I'll ping you. It makes life easier for me if you don't hit the age/timeline questions too hard, but this is completely my problem, not yours, so I'm not hatin' if anybody does bring it up IC!
Setting aside the lolhistory problem and how I'm trying to tiptoe around it, though -- in my opinion, the age issues make Shu's plight even more obviously depressing.
There are no official ages for DW7, so the precise ages of the new playables are a mystery, which was really fun when I was trying to sort out how they'd go in CFUD apps to write that pimp post before. Judging by their looks, though, Jin mostly seems to skew older than second gen Shu. Yuanji and Zhong Hui are definitely campers. Sima Zhao is debatable (I put him somewhere 20-25), but has been apped as a counselor. The rest are definitely counselors (I count Xiahou Ba as Shu, even if the game doesn't, given that he defects one battle in). Sima Shi and Zhuge Dan are in their twenties, Deng Ai is...iunno but definitely not a camper. Guo Huai is old.
Second gen Shu, on the other hand, is mostly campers. Jiang Wei and Xing Cai are 19, Liu Shan looks about the same, Guan Ping is dead by then but also 19, so Guan Suo has to be even younger than that, Bao Sanniang is about Guan Suo's age...the only ones in their twenties are Ma Dai and Yue Ying.
So what I'm totally reading from this whole age spread is one more indication that second gen Shu is a bunch of kids who have been dumped with a legacy they can't handle by their parents.
Koeiiiiiiii. ;_;
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Cao Pi's short haircut is admittedly pretty sexy though.
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WAIT WHAT
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And lol Xiahou Ba... at least the game lampshades his youthful appearance by calling him the Baby-Faced Warrior and making him wear that helmet because he's self-conscious about his looks.
But YES you are almost exactly right about second gen Shu being kids that've been dumped with their parent's legacy. Almost all of the second-gen Shu people aside from Ma Dai (and Jiang Wei I guess...) are related in some way by blood or by marriage to the men who built Shu and it's depressing to think of it that way. :(
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Jiang Wei isn't a Shu kid by blood, but I totally count Zhuge Liang as his honorary sorta-kinda-dad, because god knows he's obsessed enough with making him proud. And Kongming even calls him "my boy" at one point!
so basically shu makes me cry forever.
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And yeah I consider Zhuge Liang and Boyue to have that same sort of adoptive/foster parent-child relationship, too. Even if Jiang Wei wasn't born and raised by him. :( (I guess technically born by Yue Ying...)
Shu needs Huang Zhong and Zhao Yun back.
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But especially to Ma Dai's hotness. :d
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I kind of loathe Koei for the lack of official DW7 ages, but yeah, I'm pegging Sima Zhao at about 22-ish, and his brother is probably 25, even if Dad is apparently 24
I don't know
I hate this canon
you covered like every issue I have with Koei in this post
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fuckin' koei.