I always assumed Gil & Agatha were both 18 but I can’t find it actually stated explicitly in the comic or the Secret Blueprints (though those say he’s only been dragged around the Empire getting tested for a month, he pretty much just left Paris, I’d thought it had been a little longer than that) but it seems a lot of the fandom is saying Gil’s a few years older than Agatha. Is that from the novelizations or something?
There was something (I think an interview?) that said Gil was 21 (maybe 22?), but there’s also a theory that Foglios just forgot to subtract the two and a half years from the timeskip when answering that, so basically it’s still a giant question mark.
From the second novelization: “Gil looked down from the great height of his twenty-two years and rolled his eyes.” (Page 303 of the edition I have.)
The theory that the Foglios accidentally got Gil’s age wrong comes from Gisho’s Arc 1 timeline in Clanks, Germs & Steel, which is primarily GG meta with a bit of fic. (Well worth the read!)
Yeah, Gisho’s timeline is a really cool resource.
And I don’t think the Foglios got Gil’s age wrong, I think they got their timeline wrong. Tarvek and Gil were probably always supposed to be 18 when they started university in Paris 3 years before the start of the story, it’s a logical age for it. So they’d be 22 at the start of the series. It’s just that Girl Genius is now a huge story with plenty of scattered details, and sometimes it’s hard even for the authors to keep track of all the ramifications of some of the things they decided on 10 years ago.
Agatha’s been taking classes at Transylvania Polygnostic at age fifteen, though, so Gil & Tarvek could’ve started at a similarly young age.
Much thanks to everyone for the sources/replies.
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