kakaze said:
However, a lot of these stories have odd timelines, or oddly aging people in them. For example, in The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn is in his eighties, and Gandolf is somewhere around 400 (if I remember right).
Bzzzzzzzzzz!
Van Quirm - university of Bhang Bhang Duc
LotR is not Earth but a parallel universe so aging is different in that Tolkien put a dash of 'elven' blood into Aragorn's heritage (along with some input from a local deity - Melian the Maia if we have any loremeisters looking in
) which meant he was exceptional and destined for great things - I think he popped his clogs around age 230.
That or it might be based on a biblical reckoning where the archivists call seasons years, although one of Tolkien's nuttier ideas for the beginnings of Arda went the other way and 1 Valian Year = 11 of our sort...
Gandalf doesn't count as such as he ain't a man - he's also a Maia (1 rung down from a Vala) who are angelic beings and he takes the form of an old man when he's sent to ME with Saruman & 3 other wizards (2 of whom are consigned to 'the East' and never talked of again :twisted: ). In Middle Earth years (LotR) Gandalf is around the 2000 years old mark as a man - in his true form he's older than the world
PS - it's a story
I think the vampire question is 'genetic' and along the lines of the
Little Vampire? This takes the tack that adult Vampires can carry on breeding and have kids who are 'pure-bloods' and grow 'normally' - so like Lachrymosa. The other sort are 'turned' - so they're humans that're given the 'special' bites and then become vampires instead of 'food'
So the The Interview vampires Louis and Claudia are both turned and therefore frozen physically at the age that happened to them.
Of course this now begs the question of whether 'pure-blood' Little Vampire types then carry on aging and presumably end up as Grandparent Vampires... This would mean Terry's Uberwaldian vamps are biologiically pure as they carry on aging (the Old Count) though probably at a different rate to humans as they have a different and likely much slower metabolism...
.... erm
One last thing - in the Magpyr family wasn't Lachrymosa's mum a 'turned' vampire?
*
goes for a lie-down*