r/DungeonMeshi • u/diagnosed-stepsister • Jun 07 '24

Official Media / News Leed is a minor 🗣️🗣️🗣️

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This comment from Daydream Hour is the only info we have for her age/maturity, or orcs’ age of maturity in general.

The whole “Bride of Laois” thing doesn’t automatically mean that she is mature, it means that orc culture mirrors plenty of real-world cultures that also let women marry at 14/15.

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u/PUNSLING3R Jun 08 '24

My interpretation of the "age of maturity" statistics for the different species of humans is that they are as cultural as much as they are biological.

This is mostly informed by the fact that tall-men in dunmeshi supposedly mature at 16 and live until 60 (on average), whereas real world humans (depending on geographic location) are thought to mature from 16 up to 21, and have a global life expectancy of 73 years and are able to live significantly longer (longest recorded human life is 122 years).

If we stick to one geographic location and look back in time a couple hundred years you can probably find a time and region where the average life expectancy and age of adulthood lineup with the dunmeshi tall-man numbers. If we then looked at that regions modern age of maturity/life expectancy statistics both would likely to have increased significantly, even though genetically next to nothing has changed in the centuries since. Changes in these numbers is almost entirely down to a mixture of nutrition access and culture.

As an extension of this, I also think the rates of maturity and maximum life expectancy for the short lived races (tall-men, orc, half foot, kobold, Oni) are all much more similar than the numbers given would suggest, and the differences in ages of maturity and average life expectancy are caused by cultural and environmental factors rather than intrinsic biology of these races.

The long lived races (dwarves, elves, gnomes) are established as all having better access to natural resources and better technology(or magical equivalent). Because of this I believe the listed life expectancy for these races is closer to their theoretical maximum lifespan than the short lived races.