and how does he/she fit in within the story? I have not decided on what age my oldest character would be just yet so just gathering some ideas.
In my main WIP, the oldest character is the antagonist who is in his mid to late 60's. I feel like if its in fantasy or science fiction, age can be abstract, like Naomasa298's character. Or, in Old Man's War, the main character is well into his elderly years, but was put into a younger body. Does the age of your character change the functionality of him/her/they? Though my setting is fantasy, the characters age normal. So my oldest character, his age does change his functionality. For example, he is easily overcome because of his age.
... mine's older than time. Literally created time. So uh... Ageless? I feel like such a tool for saying it like that but I don't know how else to say it. It's a science fantasy.
In his 80's. He's the father of my MC (she's in her early 20's.) This serves a purpose of explaining how he's easily talked into doing things like trusting the villain despite the evidence against him.
A billion years old. Some are far older than that... Writing them is a bit hard. I do not go into their thoughts.
I'm on the fantasy train too. Humans though...in my witch series the main character's neighbors are all 70s-80s. She lives in an older neighborhood in the country, outside of town. It's based on where I live. I've got grumpy, old racists and charming gardeners that give me free fruit and veggies. In real life that is. In the book I'm turning them all into a bunch of murderers, cleansing the community of the wicked. Hahaha!
Well it depends. I have several Supreme deities and a demon character who are Trillions of years old. Or basically ageless. About 5 who are a thousand or so years old, they're immortal. And depending on the era, in the more sci-fi era , character's can live up to be a hundred and sixty-four. We're in the earlier bronze age they live around 75. Though even in this time, my female MCs have a tendency to live around a hundred.
Tsch... just a billion, I have characters who we're around since the beginning of time. Same, Supreme Immortal characters can be fun
my oldest human character is circa 100 - this is is from a battle of britain/ww2 flying book and hes telling his life story in retrospect so in the action sequences hes about 20. My absolutely oldest character is Tax from Dark Fire, who's a tree - he's about 200 years old.
mine is a romance and the oldest character is in his early 80s and is the father of the main character
Does it count if they are possessing someone so not in their own body? Over 13 million years old. They were one of the last survivors of the precursor race that created the animals that would evolve into humanity (13 million years is when great apes appeared). He actually was the one who caused his race to go extinct(they expunged his name from their records and replaced it with 'the genocider' so not a nice guy. He knew he was going to die so killed himself with a dagger he had spelled to absorb his 'soul', his personality, knowledge, memories, ect. He than can take over the mind kand body of anyone possessing the dagger. A quirk of the dagger is it absorbs the soul of anyone killed by it, so after 13 million years, that's alot of souls. He remains the dominant one, but with that many voices, he is not sane. Counting those in their own bodies, we have a couple at 5000-ish, and the current one who has the dagger is over 2000. For the humans, the main character is 30's.
My eldest race of characters turned up when Jupiter started moving towards the Sun and became generally annoying, but also rather wonderful. Approx 4.5 billion years or more. They wanted to know what all the fuss was about.
My oldest character is 52. Nothing special. None of my characters are strikingly old, in fact, most are in their twenties. They're pretty young.
I couldn't tell you. In my story, characters have a difficult way of being effectively immortal, and this guy was the first one. He's also the main antagonist. The oldest non-immortal is a couple of side characters who're married, they're 43 and 45. They run an orphanage that a couple of the main characters grew up in and now work at.
My MCs meet an old woman with small streaks of white in her jet-black hair. She looks a weathered seventy, but she's a spry one hundred and two when she ties on their yucca bracelets. Three days later, they learn she dies, and discover what she did for them.
Honestly, I don't know. I have a number of immortal beings from a different realm of existence, and it doesn't really matter if I pin down an age for them. To give an answer that is probably more useful, the oldest mortal character that has played any significant role was in his 60's, though his exact age is never mentioned. He acted as a sort of guide and supporting character, had a jovial personality despite circumstances being rather dire, and more or less allowed a new character to play a central role by affirming enough of said character's claims enough that the rest of my characters decided to trust the newcomer (vague, I know).
A lot of my characters are ageless, though their mental ages differ. His Brother, for example, acts like an edgy 14 year old. The typical habit of thinking themselves wiser and more impressive than their elders, along with impulsive intelligence. Whereas His Sisters act like either mature motherly women or like little girls, depending on their moods. Of course, when He is around, they can afford to be the latter.
My latest WIP has a character who ends the story at about 500 years old. I was going to write one about a knight who's been cursed with immortality, but then I remembered Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
78 years old. Though, if you asked grandpa how old he was, he'd lie. Grandpa runs the SUPER-MARS market in town square. Characters frequent the place to mooch off of the MC as he gets free stuff, daily.
I think she's 272, though figuring it out takes math. She was born in 2265, and a few weeks before her twentieth birthday, in 2285, accidentally time traveled back to 1381. Stuck there (with her beau, who is four months younger), she carves out an existence for a decade. On her thirtieth birthday, her beau-now-husband suggests they try once again to return home, and they partially succeed, landing in 1575. They spend eight years there, then jump forward again to 2051, where they stay until the end of the story in 2285. They have an artificial genetic alteration that gives them long lives (though no one is sure quite how long).
One story I am working on my main character is over 2 billion years old. Does that win? He is the emperor set in the dystopian future at the end of the known universe.
