if you don't mind a worldbuilding question, how do monster lifespans compare to human lifespans?
Prepare for so much reading, my friend lol. This is messy lmao
I’ve honestly thought about this a lot, and I can’t seem to land on an answer that suits everything I want it to! Obviously, some monsters must have vastly different lifespans to humans due to how long ago the war was. Toriel, Asgore, Gerson, etc must be well over the age of a typical human.
Concept 1: The problem I run into is that I would say different species of monsters have different lifespans, but then what are the specifications? How does having such drastically varying lifespans affect culture around family? Around death?
How would young monsters with long lifespans ahead of them, and who take longer to reach maturity because of that, react to watching friends of a different subspecies outgrow them? How would that friend react to seeing the previous monster stay so unchanging while they move on to learning more advanced topics in school?
How would parents teach their little ones about life and death, and would they be inclined to push their children towards friendships with monsters of similar lifespans? How does this problem complicate adoptions? Would a parent with a shorter life expectancy adopt a monster with a longer one knowing they’ll have to say goodbye well before the child’s birth parents would have had to?
Would a parent with a longer than average life expectancy still adopt and care for a child of a short-lived subspecies of monster knowing that someday they’ll have to let them go?
Intuitively, I would be inclined to say that monsters like skeletons or elementals would have longer lives based on their magic when compared to say, dog monsters or other small animal variants. Ghosts surely just live forever, right? And presumably the explanation for Gerson’s old age is that he’s a turtle? He’s noticeably aged though, while Asgore and Toriel seem quite youthful for how old they must be. So then does being royalty somehow change their lifespans?
Concept 2: There’s also the option that monsters could age simply based on life stages, or mental factors (similar to the gems in Steven Universe). Achievements like learning to walk, learning to speak, graduating school, living alone, having a committed partner, having children, etc. could all play a part in a monster’s perceived age. Aging via experience rather than time.
This could allow for reasonable timeframes of mental maturation growing up, and also account for slowed aging later as monsters attempt to seek purpose. Asgore and Toriel are both well-lived, but they aren’t ready to move on to another stage of life and end up stuck in the past. Meanwhile, Gerson spends his time deliberately, living life and solidifying his new role as an elder.
This interpretation also sets the stage nicely for the actual chronological age of the skeletons to be a bit fuzzy and open to interpretation (is Papyrus in his 20s? Is Gaster nearing 100? I don’t know! I don’t really care enough to pin the numbers down most of the time!).
There’s also the aspect of trauma playing a physical impact on a monster’s internal perception of age. Something like say, losing their parents as I mentioned in another post, could cause an extended childhood just as easily as it could throw a monster’s magic into turmoil in an effort to grow up fast enough to face new responsibilities.
Concept 3: They just age like humans.
Idk man, different rules are needed for different stories! At the end of the day, I like to leave it up to the interpretation of my readers
