All the ages you see me give the characters are for the convenience of the comic 😀 Same with all the canon deviations I take regarding the Genin graduation test, the reasons for the second war, the whole samurai vs. shinobi thing I made up… In Anko’s case, I needed more people close-in-age-to-kakashi to draw, but since Kakashi is such an insanely young prodigy I needed to adjust both his age and everyone else’s to permit that. I totally could’ve drawn other canonical jonins and chunins like a young Genma and a young Aoba or hell, even a young Ibiki, but tbvh I was getting sick of the dude to lady ratio in the comic and wanted to draw more women so I stuck to the few canonical female characters around Kakashi’s age ahaa
Tsume was a sort of last-minute choice in this regard. Her primary purpose in this comic is that I needed a character around Kakashi’s age who would serve as one of the townsfolk who vocally dislike Sakumo (in addition to Biwako, who is about Sakumo’s age, and a couple others I’ll draw). I had already figured the Inuzuka clan having ninken dogs would automatically make them dislike Sakumo for stepping on their turf with his foreign wolf summon, and pushed that idea further by choosing a canonical Inuzuka around Kakashi’s age to at one point cruelly confront Kakashi about the whole situation. I did consider drawing an OC or even Hana instead by aging her up some, but it just didn’t sit right with me. Most folks (me included) prefer canon characters to OCs, and I’ve already hammered in my Hyuuga OC. I also considered making Tsume around 14 and either a genin or chunin assigned to watch over the academy-aged Rin and Anko, but that isn’t really a Thing in canon and it felt even more cruel for a character with such a massive age gap on Kakashi being a bag of dicks to him to his face, soooo I just basically made her younger. Still cruel, but more in a childishly ignorant way. You’ll see, I’ll draw that scene at some point soon XD;;
But yeah! It’s all for the sake of the story. Aaaand also just because I want to draw certain characters and have no other way of feasibly cramming them in without deviating the plot too much XD;;