Thomas C. Foster is an excellent writer. I really wish I could carry on an essay as excellently as he does – he maintains an elegant eloquence while making sure that his language is quirky and simple enough that his readers aren’t alienated, or just bored.

Of course, I’m not simply here to praise him. In his book, ‘How to Read Literature Like a Professor’, he has a chapter titled more or less like this post, dedicated to blind characters and what role they play in fictional writings.
Basically, he says that the blind character is always introduced for a reason; that maintaining a blind character means that this character must act according to her disability and everyone must interact with this character in subtly different ways, making the character fairly difficult to maintain. Thus Foster concludes that a blind character would be too much ‘extra baggage’ to write about for no plot-advancing reason, and that authors write in blind characters only when they’re trying to make a point. Case in point, Tiresias, the blind seer who propagates much of the dramatic irony in Oedipus Rex.

But I’m not here to discuss blindness, either. I thought, if blind characters have hidden or allegorical meaning, why can’t the characters following the age-old anime cliché, that of sages of great age? Though not as much a burden, breathing life into a character over a hundred times older and wiser than you are is no mean feat – Which has lead me to take a page (A rather big and uncited page) out of Mr. Foster’s book, and explore with you the character of extreme age. What are the reasons for which very old characters are created? How are they maintained, and with what degree of accuracy?

Part I – Old People are Interesting

Yes, I’m taking this in parts, in hope that I don’t drown you all. ‘In what’ is your guess.

She’s also a mermaid-dragon-elf, but for brevity’s sake let’s not explore that.

This is Shining Wind’s Houmei. As our first subject, you guessed it, she is three thousand years old. The first thing that immediately comes to one’s mind is the disparity between her true age and her apparent age. Why does someone one-hundred-eighty-seven and a half times my age appear a good three, four years younger? “She looks like a kid,” they say.

But that’s exactly what makes it work. The true difference between a girl who appears to be 12 and is in fact 3,000 and a girl who appears to be 90 and is in fact 3,000 is only 78 years of difference in appearance – this is a paltry amount, equal to only 2.6% of her life. I’d imagine that if you lived to be three thousand years old, ninety years wouldn’t feel much different from twelve.

Yes, I said I’d never use statistics. That is my first lie.

Yet, we’re more surprised at a three thousand year old who appears twelve than a three thousand year old who appears ninety, despite the actual tiny gap between their appearances relative to their age. So it’s not the numbers that elicit surprise, but something else.

Really though, the answer is simple by now. You probably arrived at it before my convoluted explanation; it’s this childlike exterior that makes the character interesting. A ninety year old girl who is actually three thousand is only a witch. Ever since times dating back to the seventeenth century we’ve been bombarded with tales of mystical hags – We’ve been there, done that, it’s tried and exhausted. Old witches aren’t interesting anymore.

You may think that this character’s definitive characteristic of being old as French cheese is what makes her interesting, but really, not really. Three thousand years don’t make a notable physical scar on a character as blindness does (well, something certainly could leave a scar over that long a time, but even then it won’t be the years that are blamed). As such, the audience can’t relate to it. Three thousand years is an indefinite quantity they really don’t spend the effort conceptualizing, if they even can. One would think, ‘Three-thousand years? Okay. That’s a long time. Guess she’s about as old as my grandma, since she looks like her, I suppose’. And as we youth might think, ‘old people are uninteresting’. Oftentimes witch characters are only interesting because they know so many things you don’t.

One unconsciously attributes the appearance of an old person to a person of extreme age – it’s only natural, right? Even though the average lifespan of a person rarely exceeds a hundred years, this same appearance is attributed to humanoid beings much older than that. This is because zero to a hundred years is the human scope of imagination when it comes to age appearances. Because of this, we can’t classify such a character, and she essentially becomes an unknown quantity to us.

A baby of three months is very young. A grade-schooler of eight years is young, a teenager of sixteen is juvenile, a girl of eighteen is ‘ripe for picking’, and a man of forty three is just at the right age when he appears rugged and manly. But a woman at eighty? Old. At ninety? Old. At two-hundred and thirty? What do you think, young?

As you can see, though we have many classifications for those within the normal human lifespan, those outside it don’t get as plentiful a pool of descriptive vocabulary. Makes sense; we don’t normally see beings outside the normal human lifespan. It’s just like how certain native South-American tribes only have one word to describe snow, hail and sleet.

Now, looking back at Houmei, the triple millenarian with the morphology of a child, one should now be able to see the charm of the character age traits. No, you won’t be immediately labeled a pedophile for being interested. With an extremely old character with a young appearance, we have a contrast we can conceptualize and relate to; appearing young or old is indeed very human. Houmei is someone old that appears young, immediately going against a truth that we know very well, which will directly cause you to ask yourself questions you won’t ask yourself if you saw an old hag instead:

‘How can she look so young despite being so old? Does she have magical powers? What else does that let her do? Is she wise despite her appearance because she’s old? What role will she play in the story?’ Or, in Ningyo inquiry, ‘She’s 187.5 times my age, why am I still getting a boner?’

Be back in a second, friends. I need to beat down a nail.

Basically, by going against the natural laws we understand, Houmei instantly becomes a mysticality. You know she can’t possibly be human, you’re interested in what she is that could possibly defy age like that.
See how it ultimately starts with the disparity between age and appearance, yet ends in the audience curious as to what role the character plays in the story. Case in point, you’re getting interested.

In my humble opinion, for any character writer, that getting the audience genuinely curious as to what your character will do is the greatest success you could possibly achieve before you even start telling your story.

Besides, even if you are interested *that* way, she is three thousand years old; no one will hold it against you. Except maybe Snark.

Ningyo

Part 2

Related posts:

1. She’s Three Thousand For A Reason, You Know. Pt 3
2. She’s Three Thousand For A Reason, You Know. Pt 2
3. Some Things Are Never Meant To Be Said
4. The Twelve Episode Curse