For the sake of this discussion, I'm going to assume that Robin, Solange and Hannah are all three daughters of Ysabeau. Whether or that assumption is accurate is, of course, unknown. ;)
At the ACUS Meet-and-Greet, Karen asked me the very simple question of 'How old is Robin?' And I totally, totally hedged the question. To the point, I suspect, of seeming downright evasive. Sorry, Karen. :(
1 - The first monkey wrench is that, for me, when playing ADRG the question itself defines the answer. And the reason I hedged was that I wasn't quite sure what question Karen was asking. Karen might have been asking --
a - 'How many years has Robin experienced?'
This question is probably the closest to what most of us linear time people in the real world mean when we ask 'How old are you?' But with fast- and slow-time shadows and the like, the years that have passed in Amber since a character's birth can have very little bearing on how many years they have actually been alive.
As Liz pointed out at the Meet-and-Greet, the years in Hannah's shadow may last longer or be shorter compared to the years in Amber, and though years passed in Arden are probably close to Amber years, there's still no guarantee. Furthermore, both Robin and Solange have traveled off into Shadow. Though neither has traveled extensively, the moment *anyone* leaves Amber, their experiential time becomes completely unconnected to their Amber-comparative time.
(This is why I started the 'experienced years' line of questioning, Karen.)
Characterwise, the answer to the 'how many years has Robin experienced' question led to the answer that *roughly* Solange has experienced approximately mid-thirties years of life, Hannah has experienced approximately early thirties years of life (right, Liz?) and Robin has experienced... well, more than that. So far no time indicators connecting Robin's birth to events in Amber have been made.
The Twiki chart is, I'm afraid, inaccurate for Robin. *Extremely OOC* Robin has definitely experienced more regular (we'll come back to this later) years than Jovian. However, she is VERY determined that he never figure that out, hence her dancing around Jovian's mid-life crisis every time he mentions his 52 experienced years.
The GMs have kindly let me know that Jovian himself is an interesting demonstration of experiential years vs comparative years. Jovian worries on-camera about being 52 years old and yet... he was born 150 years ago Amber-time. (Things run somewhat faster in old Calusa. ;) Thus, Robin may be both his older *and* his younger sister. Which is of concern given the next question that Karen might have been asking.
b - 'Is Robin my older sister or my younger sister?'
Birth order, in my experience, often defines a set of roles in terms of 'oldest' 'big sister' 'little sister' 'youngest' etc. When birth order is uncertain, I've noticed that people kind of unconsciously dance around to see who will fill what role. (Much like the squirming uncomfortableness with gender descriptors/roles many people experience upon meeting a 'Pat'. Or in our case, an 'Aisling.' :)
When Robin and Solange first met after discovering they were sisters in the Breakfast of Blondes, Robin became suddenly aware of this situation (notice the *ping!* moment.) Before the Ysabeau news, they were both just cousins, no juggling or establishing of familial roles was necessary. But as sisters...
I'm not sure if Solange was aware of what was going on, but Robin -- who had spent her whole life thinking of herself as the 'little sister' of Jovian and Daeon -- suddenly realized that she was most probably the 'big sister' of Solange. And Robin's behavior began to change as she started accepting that role.
Now, Robin truly enjoys being the bratty little sister (hence much of her determination to keep Jovian in the dark concerning her experiential age) but at the breakfast, it became blazingly apparent to Robin that Solange needed a 'big sister.' And so, Robin started acting like one. (An immature big sister to be sure, but still a big sister.)
What the addition of the *far* more mature-acting Hannah will do to this dynamic will be interesting to see. As will any reordering of roles that may occur due to discovering more 'facts' regarding the next question Karen might have been asking.
c -- 'What is the birth order of the daughters of Ysabeau?'
This is a question that only Ysabeau can truly answer. (Not as tricky a proposition as it might seem, given what's going on with the raising of ghosts and such.) Luckily, birth order from a single mother seems to be something that is relatively straightforward in the Amberverse, and something that seemed to be unquestioned and unchallenged among the Elders in the novels.
Given that Gerard said that Ysabeau died giving birth to Solange, the only thing that can be truly determined right now is that Solange is most likely the youngest of Ysabeau's daughters. (Standard wacky shadow stuff is, of course, still there to hedge this assumption.) But whether Robin or Hannah was born first is, at this point, impossible to say.
Now, Robin's being very cavalier as to why the Priestesses of the Isles of the Dannan have assumed that she is Ysabeau's heir to Godhood. But that doesn't mean that the selection criteria is insignificant. Whether the first-born is heir or whether the first-to-show-up is heir has yet to be determined. (Or indeed, if there need be only one Goddess Incarnate at any given time.) What has also yet to be determined is *how* Avis knew that Robin was Ysabeau's daughter. Robin has made an assumption there that I, as a player, suspect is wildly inaccurate.
Hannah showing up in the Isles could have... shall we say, dramatic effects. Especially given -- as Liz pointed out at the Meet-and-Greet -- the design of the Trump case that was given to Robin. :)
2 - Now, so far this has been relatively straightforward Amberverse time stuff. What throws monkey wrench number two into the 'How old is Robin' question, is that Robin has experienced what I consider to be a time-free event. This is *entirely* my own speculation and the GMs are probably off somewhere giggling about how silly some players can be. ;)
On the Black Road, Robin's experiences were sequential only in discreet bundles and her connection to *any* integrated external reality was completely broken down. She came to doubt her ability to keep her identity cohesive and separate from the events going on around her. And the 'reality' in which she found herself followed no logic or rules that she was able to determine. For Robin, that included time moving forward in a linear direction. Thus, for Robin, time did not exist during her stay on the Black Road. And if time did not exist, it couldn't be measured - either in comparative years (which don't work anyway) or in experienced years (which would've worked for most of my Amber characters but not for this one.)
(Note - I suspect that Robin is not the only HOC character to have come loose from time -- Marius and Conner jump right to mind. Tasting Clarissa's brew was a big *oh, shit!* moment for me when I read about it. ;)
In comparison, Jovian's ability to bounce back and forth in time still leaves him with a strictly linear and sequential series of experienced events when perceived from his own personal viewpoint. And in all of those events, there was an exterior world to measure cause and effect against. So that even though Jovian was technically moving around in time, he was still *experiencing* it moving forward in a linear fashion. As was Robin when she accompanied him.
These episodes seem to me to be the same as time spent in a slow or fast shadow. Since they are being experienced sequentially, they count as experiential time towards the 'years lived' measure of age.
Similarly, the Chaosiders all had one another to measure time against and probably unconsciously established a linear sequence amongst themselves just to prevent that awful 'everything happening at once' situation. My guess, anyways.
However, on the Black Road, Robin was not living sequentially and had no one to check the passage of time against. Indeed, on the stairway Robin experienced *quite a bit* of not-time all on her lonesome.
Sooooo... when going back to the question of 'How old is Robin?' the answer gets even more problematical for me because of the Black Road incident.
The incident on the Black Road took what looks like maybe three to four years in comparative Amber years. But Robin was outside of Amber, therefore comparative years are no measurement. And during that time Robin's experiential years were screwed up to the point of being meaningless, so they aren't a good measurement either.
Given the above, in order for me to answer the 'How old is Robin' question I need to think of a third way to measure age (one that was neither comparative or experiential.) One thought I've been toying with is 'maturity' -- more on that later. Other suggestions would be welcome. :)
3 - The third monkey wrench in the 'How old is Robin' question is that I -- as a player -- honestly have *no* idea how old Robin is. The character of Robin was originally conceived as an NPC and, following that, played by a different player. I *think* (but don't know for sure) that no age indicator has been played or is in any of the OOC material.
In addition, I don't know how long Robin's been back in Amber since the incident on the Black Road (which is the time I took the character over.) I think she appeared there somewhere in the one to two years prior to Random's return range, but truly... I don't know. The few times I've asked the GMs about it, they've either dodged the question in email or looked at me all enigmatically at the Meet-and-Greet. So there's probably something going on there that I don't quite have a handle on. :)
It could be that I'm supposed to tell them (as opposed to asking them.) It could be that the Hivemind is just leaving its options open. It could be that there's a sinister plot going on that I have don't have a clue to. All of the above, none of the above. :)
Thing is, I did -- as a player -- tell them that after Robin returned to Amber she spent a lot of time wandering off into the depths of Arden investigating the disintegrating Shadow paths. That can't be good for maintaining a comparative sense of age. And I also -- as a player -- told them that Robin was developing a increasingly tenuous hold on reality during that time. That can't be good for maintaining an experiential sense of age.
Thus, here I am utterly at the GMs' mercy when it comes to my character's age. :)
4 - Sooooo.... given all of the above, I do not know even what *units* I should use to tell Karen that I don't know how many of them Robin has! Eek! So I find myself back to the 'maturity' scale of age.
It seems to me that when reading the Amber novels or watching the Elders interact in HoC, that while birth order is definitely used for determining seniority, there is something else at play as well. For want of better phrasing, I'm calling it 'maturity' and for this discussion, I'm going to define maturity as an ability to accurately predict one's effects on the world and vice versa and thereby act accordingly.
In our world, maturity is often tied to experiential age. But equally often, it is not. We all know people who seem to have a real handle on the world by age 18 and some who still don't seem to get it at age 54.
Now, I could be wrong, but it seems to me that Amberites change slowly, if at all. According to the novels, everyone was surprised at Corwin's change of heart during his exile. And Corwin himself was surprised at the change in Julian during that same time. While there have been a few stages or moods mentioned in HoC (Julian's Dragon days *leap* right to mind), they seem far and few between given the life spans we're talking about.
This leads me to wonder if there isn't some stage of life or 'age' at which an Amberite feels comfortable and just... stops maturing, body and mind/spirit/soul/whatever, witness Random's centuries of being a punk. :) I strongly suspect that this stoppage isn't tied to what time in their life an Amberite walked the Pattern. Otherwise Corwin would have reverted to being a real bastard after the Pattern walk in Rebma and Jovian would have remained a 15 year old mentally... oh wait. ;)
Anyways, if we are then looking at how 'mature' Robin is, the answer is not very. I've specifically been attempting to play her as a mid-adolescent, somewhere in the 14-17 comparative range. Now she's got the experience to know about and handle what would normally be considered 'adult' situations, but her emotional responses are often those of a teenage (if I've done it right :) And I've been consciously choosing to describe her with words like 'the girl' when I'm writing her to heighten that effect.
I think this was one of the sources of Robin and Adonis' *big* argument. Adonis was considering experiential years as the determiner of who was older. Robin was considering maturity level as the determiner of who was older. And yes, she felt that, even as young as she was, she was older than Adonis. (This probably wouldn't have been true of Daeon's other personalities. Just their bad luck she ran into Spring.)
Thing is, now that Arden's failing, Robin's supposed to pull off a Goddess gig, she's sworn an oath to a King of Amber that neither she or her father really... get along with, and *especially* since Vere's in the picture, Robin's realizing that she doesn't have the luxury of being a girl-child any longer. And so she's slowly creeping up on maturing a little. But she doesn't like it. Not one bit. :)
Now, after all that we get back to poor Karen Klutzke's question and why I blinked at her, stammered and couldn't answer. I didn't want to hit her with what's turned out to be -- good god! -- five pages of musings in a comfortably crowded room full of happy people when we'd just been introduced.
So, okay Karen :) How old is Robin?
1 - a) Before the Black Road - Not going to tell, but older than Jovian
b) Probably older by decades at least.
c) Probably oldest, but who knows?
2 - Blue fish-@@%## ar2wwwww 189is _/_/_ ?? has 0 MeAn-iNg
3 - I don't know. Evil GM intent supersedes any answer I can give you. :)
4 - She's a teenage girl growing into a young woman.
That probably doesn't help at *all,* does it? ;)
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