so josephine's writer, sylvia feketekuty, said she didn't have a specific age in mind when writing josephine, but that she's somewhere in the 27-29 range in inquisition. i'm going to err on the side of 29, putting the year she was born at 9:12.
leliana was born after the fereldan rebellion ends in either 9:00 or 9:02 — the lore is inconsistent. in the interests of trying to make leliana and josephine plausible peers, i'm going w 9:02, meaning leliana cannot be older than 39 in inquisition.
origins takes place in 9:30/9:31 w presumably when zevran asks her how long she was in the cloister, she replies 'just over two years' and i'm choosing to believe she's not lying. this places leliana's song (and marjolaine's betrayal) in 9:27/28 bc i'm assuming the majority of the blight takes place in 9:30 (battle of denerim is in 9:31). so leliana's bard career is over by the time she's 26. this means that when she and josephine are bards together, the oldest josephine can be is 16 in 9:28.
personally, this is great, bc as a certified crow enjoyer, i'm in my wheelhouse re: incredibly fucked up and violent institutions exploiting children. she can tell the inquisitor that she fell into the bard life as a young noble, influenced by all the other young nobles jumping off a bridge.
need to caveat here that josephine says she first discovered she wanted to be a bard while in university. this, quite frankly, doesn't make any fucking sense unless she's an exceptionally gifted student — and ppl in their mid-to-late teens did attend university in the period of history that i am currently studying, so i'm saying josephine was one of those types. it makes it pleasantly plausible to me that if she's younger than her peers, she feels under more pressure to prove herself by keeping up w the rest of them, and becoming bards is apparently what disaffected antivan nobility do.
if you remark to josephine that there prob weren't a ton of firstborn heirs raring to be a bard, josephine will reply that she was 'a rather foolish exception.'
crucially, leliana says that she didn't become 'good friends' w leliana until After the blight in 9:31, when josephine is ambassador. at this ball, sometime after 9:31, leliana and josephine sneak out around midnight to have the sort of night that ends w 'someone's small-clothes [...] pinned to a chantry board.' josephine would have been 19 at that point, leliana, 29. this is 'v new ambassador' behavior to me.
it also makes sense that leliana would view josephine as more of a baby who needs someone to bully her suitors and take care of assassins for her if the last time she and josephine worked together, at least as coworkers, josephine was in her teens and leliana was in her early-to-mid 20s, and even when the relationship becomes what leliana describes as a true friendship, josephine wasn't even 20.
i could be wrong, but i don't get the impression that leliana was around for josephine murdering that guy and renouncing the bard life. correct me if i am indeed wrong! but if i'm not, that means josephine became an ambassador sometime between 9:27/28 and 9:31. this leaves her plenty of time to establish herself as an accomplished diplomat before inquisition.
the picture this paints to me is of leliana trying her hand at being what she conceptualizes as a 'marjolaine figure' for josephine — older, worldly, and yeah, sexy. she's prob not even taking that much especial interest in josephine even keeping this in mind, bc teenagers can be a tough hang when you're in your mid-20s and know everything.
and josephine is 15/16 playacting at being a dangerous person in a way that's prob romanticized in antiva bc of the crows. and she is behaving like a lot of kids who go off to college and lose it a little, ESP kids who come from high pressure family situations the way josephine does.
they interact w each other at the point in their lives where they are Just abt to be catastrophically disillusioned and then meet back up while they're kind of still processing the aftermath of that. and then over the next decade they sink into their respective roles of ambassador and left hand of the divine.
