I wanna theorise the Ghost Gang's ages
I think it's widely accepted that the Ghost Gang are believed to be kids, or at least the same age as the Pac trio. Their exact ages are never mentioned of course, but it has never really been brought into questioning either.
It's often a point of interest when fans talk about the Pacworld Wars or the Repository - either that Betrayus was cruel enough to enrol children to fight in his army, or that Stratos/The Freedom Fighters were cruel for supposedly allowing children to be sent to the Nether.
I've thought about this a few times, also as someone who saw the Ghost Gang as teens, but recently I've looked a bit more closely at the semantics of it all, and it's led me to this one big question:
Why are we assuming that the Ghost Gang ARE children?
Don't get me wrong, we have good reasons to believe they are.
They often display childish or immature behaviour
They're familiar enough with the Pac trio to get along in ways that teenage friends would
Pinky has a crush on Pac, so we assume that they are both at least the same age...unless Pinky is a closet cougar.
But when you think about it, these traits can sometimes carry over into adulthood and do not always indicate child-like or teenage behaviour.
I've thought more on the matter, and I've come to realise that we also have a few reasons to believe that the Ghost Gang are in fact adults, or at least young adults.
Blinky is a Pac-Fu Master. The art of Pac-Fu is considered a powerful form of martial arts, supposedly more powerful than Kung Fu, and thus would take years to master. I highly doubt that a child would be able to reach Pac-Fu Mastery before becoming an adult, unless its a child prodigy. I think its safe to assume that Blinky spent several years mastering the art in order for him to reach Master level, so it makes more sense for him to be an adult. A young adult, at the very least.
Clyde speaks 9 languages. For a person to learn new languages, they have to reach an age of proficient academic understanding and dedicate some years to be able to speak multiple languages. According to google, it takes 2-3 years to become fluent in a new language. Multiply that with Clyde's languages, and he must be at least 27 years old. A loophole to this theory would be if Clyde learned all of his new languages in the Netherworld after he became a ghost.
Perhaps a gray area, but Pinky did allude to having a very busy social life. This could mean many things; either she's a teen who just likes to socialise or she's a young adult that likes to socialise. Leaning a bit more towards the latter, it could be that she's independent/old enough to make her own choices regarding dating and maintaining her busy social life (even though she spends most of her time with the boys).
A bit of a messy point, but it doesn't make a lot of sense for the Freedom Fighters to deliberately allow children to be turned into ghosts. These guys fought for freedom against Betrayus' war and tyranny, and good people like Zac, Sunny, Sir C, Spheria, etc were all part of the side that fought against Betrayus. Compare the Freedom Fighters with Betrayus and his army, and it's more likely that the Freedom Fighters would've opposed sending children to the Nether. So how did the Ghost Gang end up bodystripped? Probably because they weren't children, but were old enough to join Betrayus' army and thus face the consequences of such a choice. This makes it all the more likely that the Ghost Gang are young adults, between the ages of 18-30.
In the real world, some countries allow citizens to become part of the army as early as the age of 16. If we apply this to Pacworld, then we can stretch the perimeters a bit and speculate that the Ghost Gang are between the ages of 16-30. It would definitely make more sense in Inky and Pinky's case, who seem to act the youngest/least mature out of the four.
The Pacworld Wars and the politics surrounding who got bodystripped, and the bodystripping/soul-extraction matter itself, is quite the can of worms. For me, knowing all that we know, it would make more sense for the Ghost Gang to be young adults. They would be within the age of enforced enrollment in Betrayus' military, and that subsequently puts them in the same category of soldiers to be bodystripped.
What do you guys think? Am I reaching too far with this theory? xD
With all that being said, here is a ROUGH estimate on how I hc the Ghost Gang's ages to be, slightly tweaked from my previous guesses:
Again, this is just a theory! If the Ghost Gang are legit teens, then they're teens I guess. This is just me trying to plug in the holes in the story for why children were fighting in the war in the first place - and send to the Nether in the first place.