Vague Age / Fan Works

• The Agents in Akatsuki Kitten: Phoenix Corporation Overhaul are implied to be somewhere between mature teenagers and in their twenties. This is muddled by the fact that they don't live in a linear timeline, and some of them simply look older in a relative manner to the others. For instance, Agent Diamond is less than five feet tall (despite her impressive bosom), and is a bit of a Psychopathic Manchild, while her boyfriend, Agent Chimera, is six foot three and generally quite mature. All but one of the Agents are stated to have been born within two years of each other.
• There's this with a Kill la Kill fic, titled Asuka, particularly when the titular "Asuka" (who is implied to be either Ryuuko or Satsuki, never made clear which) dies of her illness. She is described as being "so young" when she was diagnosed and presumably didn't make it to her teens, according to her sister's narration.
  Narrator: She would have been eighteen.
• Batman: Restless Dreams: Batman finds it hard to identify Dr. Blanc's age. She has white hair, but her face doesn't seem very wrinkled, and her voice doesn't sound too aged either. Most of her face is hidden by a medical mask.
• Most of the main cast of The Bunker, In some episodes the gang is shown driving, In some episodes ACF appears in, she looks like a Powerpuff Girl.
• Due to her mother's treatment in Cellar Secrets, Ryuuko's age is a hard to gauge, as her growth and subsequent development was stunted. It was mentioned that she's younger that Nui but how much younger isn't known. To elaborate further, Nui is 16 and Satsuki is 20,^Tidbit This was a case of Writers Cannot Do Math, as the authoress miscalculated 17.5 + 2.5 and thought it added up to twenty-one, when it was actually 20. She had since corrected this mistake. by the time chapter 12 comes around. Ryuuko's vague age is a plot point, as her age not being known complicates rehabilitation, as the older she is, the less they are to recover what was lost to isolation (i.e, see Genie). What definitely forestalls calculation is the fact that when her sisters find scant photos of Ryuuko, they have the month and date on them but they don't have a year on them, in which case they go by her appearance in the photos, along with the fact that the two that did know, Ragyo and Rei, her secretary, are dead and there are no real legal documents of her.
• Averted in the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf series, as Empath and his fellow Smurfs are depicted as being in their early adult stage around 150 years of age, with Homnibus commenting on how young Empath looks for his age.
• Fan Vid communities take this trope and run with it, with any character who falls under this trope in canon (and even some who don't) having their implied or stated age vary wildly even within the same video, often for the sake of fitting the lyrics of a song or an original plot. The Animash community in particular can't decide how to interpret several of Disney's animal characters (with this being exacerbated by the fact that editors often pick characters solely based on appearance) - Angel is hit hardest by this, and can be anything from a pre-teen to an adult. This has the side-effect of causing depictions of Angel to be even more varied than those of everyone else, and causing her to be paired with nearly any character imaginable in romance-based videos since she could plausibly be the same age as them.
• From the Gensokyo 20XX series:
  • There's this with the kids but more explicitly with Yume Ni, An, Maribel, Renko, and an age-regressed Reimu. What is known so far is Yume Ni and An are fairly close in age, with Yu being at least a toddler at the time of An's birth and Reimu being at least in her formative years age-regression wise, with Maribel and Renko being a little unable to say their names correctly, as well speaking more on the level Reimu spoke at. The best estimate for the kids in general would be that their ages are vague, although Reimu and Chen would be older than they are chronologically, as biologically the former's a child, where as chronologically, she would at least in her twenties, and Chen is a youkai definition of a child, as far as that goes.
  • From a branch off, Foundling, Reimu again is supposed to be a toddler or, as the narration seemed to suggest, as she is shown to be past walking age, yet she is described as not being old enough to articulate (or rather, converse).
• Infinity Train: Blossomverse:
  • Lexi is a sentient book with the ability to shape his pages into a humanlike form. Given how long-lived denizens of the Infinity Train can be, it's hard to judge how old he is. All that's known is that he was Buried Alive for eight years and is effectively a younger version of his father, Titus.
  • In the Branching Pages side story, the Ash V scenario repeatedly Lampshades his situation as a Running Gag. When his mother warns him not to stay up after midnight, he thinks to himself that he's not ten anymore, he's ## — no actual number provided, only a placeholder. His being mistaken for/treated as ten years old is repeatedly brought up, with Dawn pointing out that they first met when she was ten, and he was older than her... though she gets confused when she tries puzzling out his exact age.
• Gory Toons: Mostly invoked by the creator, as the Toons are whatever age is necessary for a given episode to work, aside from a handful of characters who are consistently adults, children, and infants.
• In Kill la Kill AU, there's this with Ragyo and Soichiro, which would be hard to figure out, as they (then) have three kids who were eleven, nine, and eight and both Ragyo and Soichiro's parents are shown to have grey hair when they're first seen, along with being married for at least seven years prior to their divorce, thus at the most they would probably be in their late thirties at the least, if not early forties at the most. In that vein, there's also Rei, the drunk secretary, although, apparently, she is old enough to drink and can be seen doing so. ^Note To go a bit further, the legal drinking age in Japan is at least 19 or 20 years old, something the authoress didn't know at the time of the comic's start. What makes Soichiro's age more vague are his siblings, considering that his oldest brother, Bunmei, looks to be a good 11 or 10 years old, at the time he was shown as a baby [1], which in turn brings his parents' age into question.
• Kiryuuin Chronicles has Satsuki, Ryuuko, and Nui's ages. Their ages are not mentioned, however, Satsuki is stated is to have been too young to comprehend what was going on between her parents and then later her mother's mental illness, as her recollections of the past support, and she states that Ryuuko and Nui were too young to understand death and neither were they old enough to remember the events leading up to the house being burned down and them fleeing from it.
• Ragyo Kiryuin's age in Natural Selection is left unknown even in-universe. She laughs it off as a meaningless number and went out of her way to erase all records of her birth certificate, including burning down the hospital she was born in just to make sure her age stays unknown.
• According to chapter 10 of One More Time, One More Chance, Ryuuko's a teen, although some of her behavior and appearance (she's mentioned to be small for her age) would imply that she's younger. The only clue we had to Ryuuko being in that age range was an author note saying that Satsuki is about five years older.
• Ages are hard to gauge in The Outside, however, the story implies that Ryuuko is 12 and Satsuki is 22 but we don't know exactly how old Shiro and Nui are besides the latter being the youngest of the cast (she's described to be about six).
• In The Parselmouth of Gryffindor, Professor Max has been the Ghoul Studies professor "since the 18th or 19th century", and calls 120-year-old Dumbledore "young"… but at the same time does not look that old, not having a single gray hair for one thing. Methuselah Syndrome is probably at play.
• Like the above Anime example, Ash Ketchum in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines has an uncertain age. In the old timeline at least. Yes, even Ash himself doesn't know how old he was in the original anime, and in reference to it he can only measure things in gyms (That happened over the course of five gyms, it took four gyms for X to evolve, etc). Even looking at his memories, Sabrina can't figure out how old he exactly was, and even notes that at one point May seemed to have aged backwards. He's also unsure of how old the Team Rocket trio is supposed to be. In the new timeline Ash is well aware of his age, which is 15, and wondering what his canon age was is a running gag.
• In the Twice Upon an Age series, this is the case with Mahanon. The Lord Inquisitor doesn't actually know how old he is, because - as he explains to Varric, who mentions it in a letter - the Dalish don't pay much attention to things like birthdays. He knows that it's been about fifteen winters since he received his facial tattoos, which he received as a young man, so they estimate him to be in approximately his early thirties.