((So if you noticed the tags on one of my posts or on another where Junpei mentions Havardr’s age off-hand to Isiah, this post is about Havardr’s age.
I’m gonna delete the tags from the one post because they’re no longer relevant, if my Internet will cooperate with me for once and load the page I need to take the screenshot. Because they’re not relevant to the blog anymore but they are to this post!
Anyways, as the tags note, Havardr was kind of young when he joined the army; his stint was from he was 14 to when he was 16, making him 26 at the start of TCC (which is the age that Junpei claims he is) and 27-28 now in my purposefully vague timeline. Which I was going to change that for two reasons.
One: Well, that’s pretty damn young even for anime, ya know? I feel like a timeslot of 18-20 for the army and guard would be better. I mean, it wasn’t too much originally but, eh, minds change.
And two, it’s more or less the crisis I was having here.
Well, first thing to know is that when I first conceived Havardr like a year ago, I had no intention of shipping him with Logre, or even letting him live a long and happy life; he was supposed to die young with his unrequited love. So that’s why I really had no crisis over his younger age when he joined the guard. Even when their relationship evolved, I never really thought about the timeline at that point because there were no major changes coming for that era. So the realization that, even if they never had feelings for each other in the guardsmen days, that it was kind of weird that they knew each other at Havardr’s young age and then later, a decade later but still, became romantically attracted to each other, was not one that I had at that point. It’s one I only had recently, and so rather than have anxiety over a potential reception of such a relationship if/when Havardr mentions his age, I figure it’s easiest to just, you know, age him up and make it not weird. (glares at a certain artist) It’s not hard to do, not being a weirdo.
Havardr and Logre didn’t have romantic feelings for each other a decade ago. It was only when they met as equals, as adventurers, a decade later, that such feelings were even allowed to blossom, because of the deep friendship they formed as adventurers with a shared past. Even if it wasn’t though, with my concept of the guardsmen in my mind, it’s not so odd. My visualization of them is more lax than the normal army. They’re a lot more close, and while Logre was technically their overseer/general/whatever, think of it more as Junpei being the leader of the guild-- in the end, he was just one of them. Any relationship in the army would have been frowned upon should one come into fruition, no matter the rank of each soldier, because it’s against the martial code (quite unlike the guilds of the Yggdrasil trees), but it wouldn’t have been like a boss and worker in terms of the relationship they had back then and Havardr never had such a conception of Logre in the first place beyond “Okay, I have to listen to his commands because he’s the one issuing the commands to our unit.”
Nor were they ever conceived as having mutual romantic feelings for the other. But I also thought my insight into the whole situation would be helpful. Nonetheless aging them up to a closer age allows for them to have always been on equal footing and doesn’t give me an internal crisis over knowing what I intended but worrying how other people will see things.
I’ve never received any questions about it, perhaps because people never thought about it, or maybe they did and didn’t wanna say anything. If I receive a poor reception for this change, I’ll be very surprised (and disappointed in you LMAO).
So it’s not really weird now, I hope, now that I’m going to bump Havardr up a few years. Originally he was 26 when he joined Guild Muninn, 27-28 now. Now he’d be 30 when he joined Muninn, and 31-32 now. Not too difficult, huh? But I figured it’d be whiplash if he ever mentioned an age that was radically different from the one Junpei mentioned off-hand to Isiah (which was an error anyways).
I’ll also make sure to change it in the footnotes when I update TCC Someday(TM).
The only other age that is changed by this is Havardr’s sister, who’s still 2 years older than him. :P Logre is still 35-36 here (34 in EOIV).
So TL;DR had an internal crisis over something I knew to not be weird but nonetheless had reservations about and knew other people might take differently and aged Havardr up 4 years, now he’s 31-32 years old.))
