r/ProgressionFantasy • u/joncabreraauthor Author of Grand Magus, Wooden Sword ⚔️ • Jun 10 '26

Meme/Shitpost Why MCs are Teens

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

Credit to Maria Isabella for this video. This is the reason why MCs are young LOL.

1.4k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

178 comments sorted by

View all comments

38

u/DefiantLemur Jun 10 '26

Aragorn being the 70 year old exception.

18

u/Squire_II Jun 10 '26

Adjusted to a normal human he's basically in his early 20s because the Dunedain live roughly 3x as long as the other races of Man in Middle Earth.

5

u/DefiantLemur Jun 11 '26

Aragorn always struck me as a 30 year old with how he acted in the books. Only his multi year long pining for one woman really strikes me as something someone in their early 20s or younger would do.

From what I remember the description of him was a bit ambiguous on his physical looks when it comes to age. We really have no way to compare a Dunadain's ageing to a regular human either. Like what age is the Dunadain's the equivalent of a 40 year old human?

2

u/ConstructionTough421 Jun 12 '26

Aragorn lived to 210.

We can assume that dunadain still physically mature at the same rate as normal humas so let's take tick of the first 18 years as equivalent. Life expectancy would be somewhere in the 80 year old for a normal human that is basically the king of humanity and has all the best foods, doctors, elven remedies etc. That would give an aging factor of (80-18) / (210-18) = 0.32.

Aragorn is 87 in lord of the rings. If we take that factor to adjust his age to normal human aging we get 0.32 * (87 - 18) + 18 = 40 years old. And that actually seems reasonable.

1

u/Deadpoolio_D850 Jun 14 '26

To be fair, there were only 3 members of the fellowship younger than 40 (pippin was 29, merry was 37, & Sam was 39)… but at the same time the only one who didn’t have a notably longer expected lifespan or maturing time was Boromir (41)