remnantworld text hub

in the age of the "minor-coded character", being us is really fucking annoying.

much ado about the Advent Children. are we adults? teens? little kids in the bodies of adults?

fun fact: it really does not matter!!

our age-incongruity is something that a lot of folks in post-remake FF7 fandom really, really can't seem to wrap their heads around. arguments about whether or not it's appropriate to ship us with anyone. calling yazoo and i "literal children", ignoring our abilities and capacity for total independence. calling me a "man-baby" for daring to show emotions beyond cold, edgy contempt for the world around me. i could go on forever.
it's frustrating to constantly run into this, and to know that others have gotten bullshit for not caring about it -- preferring to engage with us as we are presented without debate.

as part of syzygy and synthesis, as well as someone who actually cares about the story being relayed, it's all pointless. 

from a plural perspective: it's common knowledge in plural spaces that age doesn't align with intelligence, or independence, or external interests/hobbies/activities. plenty of jokes about the jaded 15 y/o who's in charge of the body's 9-to-5, or the 9 y/o who secretly loves dark souls, or the 40-something who copes through cartoons and comfort foods. idek what else to say about this. it's just a fact -- plurality sometimes makes internal experiences of age clash with external self-expression. 

from a remnant perspective: even if nomura sat down and said "yes, kadaj is 18, yazoo and loz are 21" or whatever, that still would not negate the vulnerability inherent to being born 2 weeks ago, supernatural knowledge notwithstanding. 
i personally had little control over how people physically saw me. unlike kadaj(who had a good amount of control over his body from months of practice prior to the events of AC), i could never really guess whether some one saw me as a leather-clad MMA combatant, or a strange looking little boy, or a formless cloud of pestilence. to this day, i confuse people with various parts of my appearance/expression and its relation to my identity -- from my age to my gender to my mobility aids and visibly autismophrenic behaviors.

from a story perspective: source material makes our ages unclear on purpose. the reunion files say yaz&i our in our twenties, but interviews with nomura&nojima talk about how we have a certain "childlike purity/naivete", and refer to us as "boys" in the same vein as kadaj. 
kadaj is younger than us(reunion files place him between 13-19), but has more chronological life experience and a more solid sense of self and purpose. he's the one "in charge" from the perspective of rufus, the turks, vincent, and cloud. 
this vagueness is directly related to our existence as remnants of sephiroth, as well as the general 7comp meditation on the nature of child soldiers; the cognitive dissonance required to be one, or to utilize them in your technofascist military dictatorship.

all this to say -- there's no clear answer to the question of our "true age" for a multitude of reasons. the vagueness is not only important to us as beings, but a deliberate part of our depiction on the 2D plane. learn to be okay with the fact that there is very little about a remnant that makes sense to the average person. we do not operate on human timescales or within human social norms. there are parts of us that are very childlike or straight up infantile, and other parts that are undeniably Grown As Fuck. we will indulge both of these parts at our own whims, whether it fits your interpretation or not. while our bodies are impacted by external interpretation, it is no longer the end-all-be-all of our lives. we now live in a way that rejects being "owned" by any individual or group -- whether it's sephiroth, shinra, square enix, or a head-canoner hellbent on ignoring anyone's perspective but their own.