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Okay, this is a question that has been bothering me for a while.
In a few werewolf books that I have read, the authors seem to state that werewolves age differently than humans. Which is that they age slower; for example if they are forty, they might look like they are in their thirties or something along those lines.
And if a werewolf is the mix between a wolf and a human, which the two have different aging rates, how would werewolves age?

Less than 10 threads down is an exact duplicate of this thread.

I believe werewolves live longer than normal humans because of hybrid vigor. (Or mystical resilience.)

i have a thread with exact same name lower on the page

In the camp Lycanthrope universe they live around 300 years.

Sorry Night Hunter. I will post there. I must have past it up when I was searching. Sorry.

thats ok

i don't care
either way i get the input i needed

Mine can live to over 2000 years, and have the choice of performing a ceremonial request to "die" and move on to the afterlife, after holding a funeral party in their final living moments. But the thing is, those types are quite rare...

I'm still deciding if i want my character to die at old age or in a sword fight at the age of 150 yrs. old and his wife/kitsune is still very beautiful.

I couldn't find the thread itself, but I remember we had a thread regarding the typical age of a werewolf and actually came up with a mathematical formula that compared the typical lifespan to the typical age of sexual maturity.

The human code, for example, would be:
Average age of maturity: 13
Average lifespan: 75

75 / 13 = 5.7

And the canine code would be:
Average age of maturity: .5 (six months)
Average lifespan: 15

15 / 0.5 = 30

So even though most canines live significantly shorter lives, they are sexually mature for five to six times longer compared to humans.

Werewolves, being both man and wolf, could have a hybrid of the two. To justify their longer lives, they would have to have human maturity and a canine final result, IE:

X / 13 = 30
or

In this case, the average lifespan for a werewolf (X) would be 390 years.

boy, if it went through that way, this world would be awesome before 2016. that is if sexual maturity were risen for the sake of the combination. so that said, we'd be over populated before we knew what happened.

Sorry i went off topic.

Wow, 390 years... that's a long time.
And so with this in mind, would their maturation be even slower than a humans? Or would it just have it's own speed that is separate from a wolf's and human's maturation speed?

It sounds like they would mature at the same rate as a human, but after that they would age much, much slower.

So until their 20's they would appear their age, but after that they would remain youthful for a much longer period of time than a normal human.

And they can't apply for Social Security before age 350.

Suddenly, being a Werewolf doesn't look so hot...
I'd have two hundred ninety years to go...

Not interested.

I don't think Social Security would be necessary for seniors with 100+ years of educational and self-defense extracurricular experience. ;)

My own understanding was that they would age like a normal human, but the lycanthropic virus/bacterium/whatever continually repairs the affects of aging, so a werewolf would age normally up until somewhere between his prime to mid fifties, then probably stay there until either his lycanthropy expires or somebody puts a silver bullet in his head.

That was the only other thing I remember a strong consensus about: that the world as we know it is too paranoid for a werewolf to ever possibly live that long. The problem is that we couldn't actually know a werewolf's average life expectancy until one of them actually dies of natural causes, and sad but true, the human race hasn't evolved culturally enough to ever allow a werewolf to live that long. A werewolf dying of old age today based on those numbers would had to have been born in the early 1600s (AKA: the Witch Trials / Inquisition period). A werewolf surviving through that period alone, never mind all the wars and other such insanity between then and now, up until present day would require the mother of all cheap plot devices to implement.

RedEye wrote:And they can't apply for Social Security before age 350.

Suddenly, being a Werewolf doesn't look so hot...

I dunno... if it meant I'd be likely to still have my faculties at that age, I'd go for it like a shot. Just imagine all the cool things that would be invented in the 22nd, 23rd and later 21st centuries that otherwise I'd never know about...

Terastas wrote:A werewolf surviving through that period alone, never mind all the wars and other such insanity between then and now, up until present day would require the mother of all cheap plot devices to implement.

"Amistad" was a cheap movie? D:

Jokes aside, that would rrrrrrrrrreally depend on how lazy the writers are IMO... Besides, if the plot doesn't stand out (at least not enough for it to be blatantly terrible), the action should make up for it, like 300.

kitetsu wrote:"Amistad" was a cheap movie? D:

1) Amistad took place in the 1800s, not the 1600s.
2) Nobody in the movie was implied to have lived up until the turn of the century, much less present day.
3) There were no werewolves in it.

Comparisons are only funny when they're relevant.

Hey, even though there are any werewolves in the Bible look at how old the got, i mean some lived to be thousnads of years old.

wait...I've done research on this...

there are werewolves in the Bible. THe story is hidden. Some people have made a connections were Saint Christopher was a werewolf.

Yeah it said dog man were turned back into people on the pentacost (or whatever) by Christ.
So if real werewolves could be old... but i doubt they could live thousands of years old.

Black Claw wrote:Hey, even though there are any werewolves in the Bible look at how old the got, i mean some lived to be thousnads of years old.

The Bible isn't a living breathing person. It's an idea, and to quote V for Vendetta, "ideas are bulletproof."

It's easy to kill someone, but a helluva lot more difficult to make it seem like someone never existed. Somebody with the proper resources and that knew what they were looking for could probably find records of werewolves that did live during that time period, but not the werewolves themselves. Their descendants (birth and biting alike), yes, but not themselves.

Besides, a werewolf that was born in that time period would be completely behind on the times. That was one of my bigger gripes about Underworld -- a bunch of vampires and werewolves originally born anywhere between as early as the dark ages or as recent as the renaissance should not have been so handy with semiautomatics.

Maybeso, maybeno... These people would have learned that you have to keep up with tht world around you if you don't want to stick out. They probably learn constantly; which is a good way for Humans to keep mentally alert and "young" as well.

What they would be good at would be as "re-enactors" and historical accuracy people, since they lived in those times and remember them. You could probably get an excellent bit of sword instruction out of either an ancient Werewolf or a similarly ancient Vampire, since thsy would have known how it was actually done, rather than some "Living History" specialist.

Of course, the "Lesson Fees" could really bite...

technically you can't say that they'd be behind on the time. Old people can't work computers because they are physically ld their ideas and ways of thinking are old yes but think about it

You have been alive for 300 years. You will need to be caught up on the times. You wouldn't be around today only trusting riding horses and believing the world's flat

If you remain physically young you will learn fast as a normal person of that age would. Besides to keep a werewolf's anonymity would need o blend in. It'd be odd to see a twenty year old saying "AHHH you young whippersnappers with your new fangled interweb and izunes, googling your yahoos and whatnots..."

But yeah I agree with the rest

Well, how would the mind age then?
We have gotten down a few theorys about their physical appearance and what not, but what would happen to the internal organs over time? I mean, sooner or later a heart will stop pumping blood throughout the body.

Terastas wrote:

Black Claw wrote:Hey, even though there are any werewolves in the Bible look at how old the got, i mean some lived to be thousnads of years old.

The Bible isn't a living breathing person. It's an idea, and to quote V for Vendetta, "ideas are bulletproof."

I think Black Claw means the ages of some of the characters in the Bible... the ones around the time of Moses (or a few generations either way) seem to have strange lifespans - the longest isn't far short of a thousand years. My guess for an explanation is that someone either got their decimal point in the wrong place, or mistranslated "month" as "year" at one point...