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In Episode 11, Rory determines Yao's age by merely looking at her. Is there a
rule on how to determine a Dark Elf's age? Besides her hair color, Yao appears
to be somewhere in her twenties.

A translation of the light novel covers this part with:

> At a glance, she seemed to be a Dark Elf female.
>
> She looked to be roughly 300 years old, but on the surface she resembled a
> human in her late twenties.

[![Picture of Rory mercury: "300 years old or
so..."](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DW7iU.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DW7iU.jpg)


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2016-03-02T23:36:13.673
30173
2016-03-06T11:12:47.617
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How can a Dark Elf's age be determined by looking at them?


Just like in our world, Westerners might have problems telling Asians apart,
the same can be said about humans and elves.

Humans live and grow up looking at other humans. So they learn to tell them
apart and categorize them much more easily. Now, this assumes that you can
tell elves age from their appearance, it is just that humans don't learn that
skill, because they either haven't seen an elf or haven't seen enough to
create big enough sample to learn differences due to age.

Rory is over 900 years old and travels a lot. So she must have met quite a few
elves in her lifetime. Also, she could have met the same elf multiple times in
their lives, noting their changes in appearance.

The second thing that comes to mind is precision of her guess. Us humans are
able to tell age with precision of +-5 years. It is safe to assume that elves
appearance changes much slowly with age compared to humans, so the precision
might be as low as +-50 years. So if Rory estimates Yao's age at 300, she
could very well be between 250 to 350 years old. That is huge timespan. It is
like saying an adult 40 year old man " _is around age of toddler_ ".


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2016-03-04T07:07:01.170
30205
2016-03-06T11:12:47.617
2016-03-06T11:12:47.617
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answer