On Elven Ageing
It’s canon that elves were shown to the dragon eggs at age 20, and humans were shown to the eggs at age 10.
Going from this, I have 2 ideas on how elves age compared to humans:
1: 1 elf year = 2 human years (of development. Pretty simple, at age 10 an elf is as developed as a 5 years old human, at 30 (around the point where their magical boost starts to fade and they reach “of age”) they match a 15 years old human (which checks out since people used to be considered adults much earlier, also adds a certain horror to the war if 30 year old elves and 15 year old humans are considered a normal sight on an Alagaesian battlefield). This tapers of after a certain point; 100 year old Arya is not considered the elf equivalent of 50 (which I’m assuming is around the 5-800 year mark, accounting for individual competence, wisdom and experience). Maybe you need to divide it by 3-4 from age 60-99, then by 5 afterwards? It gets weird the older they get, since their mental growth probably isn’t also linear.
2: I’ve read here on tömblur dot com that helicopter-parenting stifles the mental development of a child. Considering how ancient almost all elves are, how late in life they have children, and how rare children are, it’s possible that a 20 year old elf is as physically developed as a human 20 year old would be, accounting for ancient dragon-magic, but far more naive and childlike in their general outlook. Innocent might be a better word, since they grow up in a society that even our most advanced IRL civilisations can’t compete with (in terms of individual wealth and living standard per elf; I imagine the larger scale of things IRL and the existence of multi-billionaires would skew statistics in our favour unless you don’t count them). This would mean that elves are the cranky old coots way they are because they’ve lived to ages no human has in our world, and their peers age with them instead of leaving lonely elders alive as their lifetimes of, say, 70+ years draw to a close.
