- Woo: Why’s your dad re-playing Baldur’s Gate 2?
- Sandra: Well, it’s a great game.
- Woo: But there are so many exciting new games!
- Sandra: I guess he’s also feeling a bit nostalgic about it.
- Woo: Nostalgia…
- Woo: … that’s a difficult concept to understand when your species has an average life expectancy of three years.
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XD
Reading Wiki, while wild raccoons have an average life expectancy of 2-3 years (the most common causes of death being hunting and vehicle injury), captive raccoons can live for up to 20 years.
So it’s likely Woo, Lily and any kits they produce will live for somewhere between the two extremes. Although given S&W follows an indeterminate timescale (possibly even the standard comic / animation trope of time standing still so no-one ever ages), from our PoV they’ll undoubtedly live at least as long as Novil and Powree are sufficiently motivated to continue producing these strips 🙂
3 Years? He already exists for more than like 6 years… Though that would be breaking the 4th wall…
What? Novil are you trying to make me waste more money on Steam? This is not okay. XD
@ butterbattle:
Steam doesn’t need him to help you waste money. That’s what the Summer/Winter Sales are for 😛
For a moment there I hesitated… Should Woo be still alive? How old is he anyway?
@ Mike:
Well he did say an average so he might have surpassed it
What would a raccoon know about video games anyway? Then again, why am I questioning a clearly, sapient raccoon?
@ Mike:
Age doesn’t really apply in this comic. Sandra’s been for the entire duration of Sandra and Woo. Comic world logic breaks rules because it’s more fun that way!
BG2 is the best game EVER. Only game which can claim be as good as it is Fallout 1&2
@ mittfh:
Actually, it’s been confirmed that the cast do age – just slower than real life. (I’m guessing at about a third speed)
Although if someone could confirm which page that this was said on, it’d be mighty appreciated. ;D I’m having trouble finding it.. ;<
@ Diablillo:
Try Planescape: Torment
As another commenter has said, a raccoon in the wild has a maximum life expectancy of three years due to life threatening situations… not old age. That’s about the age where they are no longer operating at ‘peak’ and fall to dangerous situations.
Raccoons in ‘domestic environments’ (where humans have removed most of the trauma-related and disease-related dangers) tend to live into their second decade. It should be noted they seem to enjoy it too.
As a trucker, one of my fellow truckers had a pair of raccoons as ‘truck mates’. I knew him 12 years and he had the same raccoons throughout the entire time. They had kits regularly (even the last year I knew them).
Basically, less time passes in a page, or between pages, than the time required to make each page. This is variable depending on the individual page, but a page could be depicting a time period of a few seconds to half a minute, with anywhere down to no time at all between pages. So for half a week’s worth of pages, only a few seconds could pass in-comic. 3.5 real-life days per page, with perhaps 24 pages per day depicted (a complete guess) would give a ratio of… 84:1. 3 years in-comic could easily take several hundred years in real life if there were large time skips.
TL;DR: Large time-skips between story arcs are the only significant contributor to the passage of time in a comic. 3 years in-comic could take an arbitrary amount of time in real life, essentially dependant on how much is happening in-comic (more events = more time in real life).
@ Eagle0600:
Correction: Where I say “3 years in-comic could easily take several hundred years in real life if there were large time skips.” It should read “3 years in-comic could easily take several hundred years in real life if there were no large time skips.”
Well, the comic is only updated twice a week, so that means that one week to us is usually ranging from a few hours (or minutes) to a few days to them.
@ mittfh:
Just because Woo will likely live to a Ripe Old Raccoon age, he is still shaped by the Raccoon Culture which, as a whole, doesn’t really expect to see that 4th birthday cake.
So, yeah, it’s a perfectly Valid comment for him to make.
Is that Shadows of Amn, or Throne of Bhaal?
Nostalgia was so that adults can live longer than reproduction age so that their children can be protected until they reach reproduction age.
Nostalgia is also caused because of territorial tendencies and the need to be able to figure out safe locations to return to time and time again.
Well, that is just my take on it. Nostalgia is fairly irrational. It put a bunch of products and intellectual property in the gutter.
Whoa? Larissa was the end of the Smokey arc? Really? I expected more than that. Oh well, it’s good to see our Main Protagonists back.
Guy, guys, guys: the lifespan of talking raccoons is totally different from the lifespan of regular raccoons. Relax.
why does it always say that it was published the day after it was actually published?
I prefer the “Least I Could Do” rules. Humans age but animals are immortal.
The entire website is in the future!
Titansfalundrme wrote:
The Patreon business with “being able to see things before others can” makes things difficult for Novil when stating when the comic came out to non-Patreon members.
And once again there are these games and references I don’t get since I’m not old enough to have heard about them q.q
Is it the original Baldur’s Gate 2 or the Enhanced Edition?
@ Dan:
only the original is worthing it, with a few mods to fuse and extend the trilogy.
and gameranger to multiplay.
@ mittfh:
Except that if you look through the archives, Sandra is clearly aging. There was even an arc where Cloud’s puberty was *ahem* examined.
@ Titansfalundrme:
Are you perhaps in a different time zone?
@ Diablillo:
I know, right?
YES! Baldurs Gate 2! Someone who plays that game, can’t be an evil person ^^ I’m just now playing Baldurs Gate 1, right now
pillaging the siren’s cave south of candlekeep.
Other (old) games on my hard drive:
Alpha Centauri/without expansion
Baldur’s Gate 1/2
Master of Orion 1/2
Master of Magic
Duke Nukem 3d
Fallout
Tactics Ogre/Let us cling together
Final Fantasy VII
Syndicate
Bah, we all know Woo is far above average, so nothing to worry about.
GO FOR THE EYES, WOO!
@ butterbattle:
Baldur’s Gate 2 is hardly a waste of money. Neither is the first game, their expansions, Icewind Dale and its sequel, or Planescape: Torment, which are all fairly similar experiences gameplay-wise due to mostly sharing the same engine. Torment in particular is often cited as one of the best games in existence.
I want someone to do a new Baldurs Gate but when they do it I want them to give you the choice of doing the attacks with a camera view from above like the old games and the option to change the camera angle to first or 3rd person view on the character your using like Elder scrolls.
Still love Baldurs Gate 1+2 and you can get it on your iphone or ipad or whatever or just play it again on your PC it’s like £15 on Steam.
You’re going to kill off woo and end the comic soon, aren’t you? Please say no.
@ evilmidnightlurker:
LOOOOOOOOOOL XD rofl
There seems to be a bit of confusion in the comments with the questions raised in this strip so imma throw my two cents in this discussion.
I always thought the characters in this comic aged in real time. You can tell by the height and mannerisms from Sandra in the first few strips, You can clearly see that she has grown since then. Woo even looks different from when he first appeared and the very first strip even states that he was six months old at the start.
That and a 2012 strip titled ‘The Curse of 12 year old boys’ (you know the one) tells me that the characters were all 12 at that point and Sandra was 8 in the first strip.
TLDR; So now we know that Woo is 7 and Sandra is 15 in this strip.
Boom.
@ Arent:
You forgot to say Tyrian and Mechcommander Gold
If a raccoon can talk, a raccoon can lie.
@ mittfh:
It’s hard out there for a ‘coon…
He got you there, Sandra
It’s a little sad to note that if the in-strip timeline ever advances that far, Woo dies from old age.
…nah. Larisa would have discovered how to make him immortal by that time.
@ Kaprekar:
That seems logical. You also reminded me about “Deadpool kills Marvel Universe”. But I think it’s best not to explain why, as not to spoil the fun of reading the story 🙂
Ahh Baldur’s Gate 2, still my favortie video game of all time, and I’ve played every black isle RPG game even the original two fallouts (Though I’ve yet to finish the icewind dale games). I should get around to playing the ultima games but that will require some serious concentration to get around their less intuitive interfaces, at least compared to what I’m used to.
I wonder if this will go anywhere, also I hope we see Lily soon again.
Definitely one of the better ones though Obsidian Entertainment (reformed Black Isles Studio) recently made a worthy successor in Pillars of Eternity, also on steam.
I have no doubt Woo will last decades. He has (more than) adequate food, protection from predators, medical care and inoculations.
Readers should worry more about Sid, Shadow, Lily, and any other animal-cast not under the direct protection of Unpronouncable, the Raccoon Goddess.
Hmmmm.. why is woo still alive?
the webcomic started in 2000….
so he should have died of old age 5 times by now..
Minsc and Boo!!! You forgot Boo!!!