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[romelluka]

Though it’s just because the animation re-uses backrounds, it’s still hilarious that when Pidge sneaks out in Episode 1, she is walking... straight out of Iverson’s office. And neither Lance nor Hunk notice this.

(The screencap quality is crummy, but the rooms are both clearly labelled as A-34 when you check the episodes. It’s really the same room.)

[romelluka]

I created a footnoted attempt at a timeline for Voltron canon and now you can have it, too. This is surely not the only timeline out here, but none I could find included the elements I wanted to be included, so I made my own.

If I missed something, please let me know!

[romelluka]

Oh, but I was only referring to Kova’s age individually and not Altean cats as a species! Kova’s 28 years are what matter to figure out when Allura was born, the fact that it’s an unnatural age for Altean cats doesn’t figure into it.

Kova is definitely freakishly old. Good kitty.

Altean & Galra Lifespans

What we know and how to connect it into something that seems inane but is canon, I guess.

Also Lotor’s personal history’s  timeline disclosed.

I sincerely do not think anyone on Voltron staff has supervised this very tightly so none of these implications are likely to be lore-relevant. I just found them fun to pick apart. If I missed any info, please let me know! 

Let’s begin with Altean lifespans! This one is easy. We know the Castle of Lions is 600 years old. We also know that Coran was older than baby age by the time of its creation, since he was able to accompany his grandfather places while it was being built:

This marks Coran as anywhere between 600 and 700 maybe, since he seems to have still been generally young then.

Coran is further considered not OLD-old but definitely on the older end of adult age. This is evidenced by the discussion about him having the slipperies - he is definitely aging, but he’s got plausible deniability on being a real senior citizen. Maybe around 60 to 65 years of human age. So assuming he’s maybe 650 or something, it’d make sense to assume Alteans naturally age to around 1000 years. That’s a pretty neat 1:10 conversion from human age… seemingly.

In reality, it doesn’t work out nearly as smoothly.

Because now we get into how the process of aging works for Alteans. We have a pretty solid timeframe for it thanks to Allura and Kova, the cat. Kova is intially a cute fat baby and we see her as such before Allura is born:

That it’s before Allura’s birth is important to remember because Kova gives the only solid indicator of timeframe in the flashbacks.

Keep reading

[romelluka]

Altean & Galra Lifespans

What we know and how to connect it into something that seems inane but is canon, I guess.

Also Lotor’s personal history’s  timeline disclosed.

I sincerely do not think anyone on Voltron staff has supervised this very tightly so none of these implications are likely to be lore-relevant. I just found them fun to pick apart. If I missed any info, please let me know! 

Let's begin with Altean lifespans! This one is easy. We know the Castle of Lions is 600 years old. We also know that Coran was older than baby age by the time of its creation, since he was able to accompany his grandfather places while it was being built:

This marks Coran as anywhere between 600 and 700 maybe, since he seems to have still been generally young then.

Coran is further considered not OLD-old but definitely on the older end of adult age. This is evidenced by the discussion about him having the slipperies - he is definitely aging, but he’s got plausible deniability on being a real senior citizen. Maybe around 60 to 65 years of human age. So assuming he's maybe 650 or something, it'd make sense to assume Alteans naturally age to around 1000 years. That’s a pretty neat 1:10 conversion from human age... seemingly.

In reality, it doesn’t work out nearly as smoothly.

Because now we get into how the process of aging works for Alteans. We have a pretty solid timeframe for it thanks to Allura and Kova, the cat. Kova is intially a cute fat baby and we see her as such before Allura is born:

That it’s before Allura’s birth is important to remember because Kova gives the only solid indicator of timeframe in the flashbacks.

Kova is 28 decaphoebs (thus roughly years) old shortly before everything goes to shit and the war starts. Assuming Kova was around 1 or 2 when we first see her, that leaves 21 years for.... all of building Voltron, Voltron being active AND Allura growing into the person we see.

Let that sink in. Voltron was only active for about 25 years. That’s canon. It left a legend for millenia, but it wasn't even there for a full century.

And this also tells us that Allura initially aged at human speed. When staff calls her a teenager, that is LITERAL in Earth terms. We are thus forced to conclude that while Alteans live for thousand years on average, their whole childhood to adulthood process only takes 20 years. Like, basically the blink of an eye. Holy shit.

Meanwhile the one thing to truly age Alteans is stress. Look at Alfor before and after Zarkon and Honerva got obsessed with quintessence.... This is what stress does to you...... 

... okay no, this is me being flippant.

Enough of that, let’s move on to Galra lifespans.

The imperial Galra as we know them all live to incredibly long age. Sendak is as old as Zarkon and Haggar but he's far from the only one who's reached such incredibly lifespans. 

Lotor's nanny--- I mean governess-- is also still around. She raised Lotor since some point in his childhood after his old governess is implied to be executed, so she's still thousands of years old.

I'd been wondering for a long time why they'd keep her around until my best friend pointed out the easy solution: the majority of citizens in the Galra empire had one-time quintessence transfusions that simply let them ALL live to such incredible ages.. This also explains the constant expansion of the Empire and its growing quintessence need since the population is only decimated by battle deaths but not really by anyone passing of old age. 

Only people who were already on the brink of death at the time of quintessence administration seem to need continous amounts of it: Zarkon, Haggar and the Archivist. Lotor, who's had his administration in the womb, naturally also never needs another dose. 

So by now everyone's kind of immortal, but what about before?

The best we get is this statement on Galra history. 33 rulers through 13 millenia - substracting Zarkon we get 32 rulers through 3 millenia here. We get an average time of ruling from this. It's 94 years. 

Of course, the correlation of these 94 years to lifespan is nebulous. There are numerous references to the Galra always having been a warring and conquering people, even before they started space travel:

Thus it is pretty hard to believe that Galra rulers historically just died of old age. They likely got killed one way or another after they passed their physical prime. 

Now we can only speculate... if this rough century of leadership represents maybe the strongest age of 20 to 40 in human years, then that adds another 100 years of childhood and then a few hundred years more of later adulthood. Galra could maybe age to 600 or even 800?

These are also just speculations. They might have the exact same life expectancy as Alteans originally. We can’t say for sure.

This is also all assuming a continuous aging process akin to that of humans and not whatever is going on with Altean speed childhoods. We can’t really say anything about the aging speed of Galra. Allura is already a teen when Lotor is born so her age compared to his in the final episode’s canon AU means nothing - hell, Lotor isn't even pure Galra so he might age different from the rest of them......

But we do still know some interesting facts about his individual life story.

Romelle states that they've been at the colony since pretty much the time the war began - it can't be EXACTLY that time, of course, but she's also narrating this generations (read: millenia) after the fact. 

But with this we know that the colony has likely been around for maybe 8 000 or 9 000 years. That's enough for nearly 10 generations of Alteans but still close to the war to be known as ‘since the war began’ in the local folklore. 

Meanwhile we also know research for building the colony took Lotor a few hundred years: 

This implies that his one year test that lead to his banishment was maybe 500 to 1 000 years or so after the war.

And by that time Lotor already looked the same as we know him now. Lotor's been a young adult for ca. 9 000 and years, it took him less than 1 000 years to reach adulthood.

This concludes my thoughts on alien aging in Voltron. Thanks for reading!