side blog

to start, let’s label/describe the flashbacks first.

Alox flashback

Talya flashback

meeting Vortalis

discuss plans to kill Gorst / killing Gorst

holland and vortalis stand on a balcony waiting to open the gates to the people for the first time to start off their reign + child kell visits the throne room

vortalis dies + danes takeover

And now let’s list the canon info we are given about holland’s age during said flashbacks.

Holland is 9

Holland is 18

Holland is (?) “years” have passed since #2

Holland is (?) “months” have passed since #3

Holland is (?) a few days/maybe a week or two have passed since #4. (also child kell is “no more than 12 or 13” y/o)

Holland is (?) “2 years” have passed since #5

if holland is 37 (and Kell is 21) in present-day adsom, then we can assign these ages to Holland in the flashbacks

9 y/o

18 y/o

27/28 y/o

28 y/o

28 y/o (kell always HAS to be 12 here bc he is canonically 21 nine years after this flashback)

30 y/o

which means vortalis hunted holland for basically 10 years! and that holland put up with it for 10 years and did nothing about it despite knowing who was sending all these hitmen after him. imo it was unlikely this went on for a decade. to me it’s way more reasonable if it went on for like 3/4 years max. which means:

9 y/o

18 y/o

21/22 y/o

22 y/o

22 y/o (kell is 12 again)

24 y/o

which makes holland about 31 in present day adsom. my point is that both of these hypothetical age timelines work bc of the ambiguity. just depends on how much time YOU think passed between flashbacks 2 and 3.

interestingly enough, schwab said in a youtube video recap of the series, that during flashback #5 “kell is like 10 and holland is like 20” (said around the 11:35-11:40 time stamp). this is wildly inconsistent with holland being 37 in ADSOM!

Holland being 37 and Kell being 21 hard locks their age difference as 16 years. So if Holland is 37 in ADSOM, and was 20 at the time of flashback #5, that makes Kell 4. Which he very clearly was not.

The math doesn’t quite work out though bc if Holland is 20 in flashback #5 it means he is 29 in present day. And bc of the 10 year age gap, Kell is 19. But he is canonically 21. Kell HAS to be 12 in the #5 flashback, but this makes their age gap even smaller at only 8 years! (v different than 16!)

all these inconsistencies lead me to believe that in schwab’s mind, kell and holland are about a decade apart but she never worked out the timeline very intricately. and that my proposed second timeline is very close to correct and reconciles all the conflicting word of god data the best 😀

anyway, this post exists bc i thought holland was like 28 the entire time i was reading the trilogy and then i found out he was 37 and was shook. i then went looking for evidence and found a mess 🫢

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bonus: here’s more reasoning on the flashback math written out in words if any of it was confusing 🤯

in his first flashback, holland is 9, in the second flashback, holland is 18. but in the third flashback (silver wood with vor) his age is not mentioned! and because of this, we cannot definitively state his age in the present.

in the third flashback the only clue we get is that vortalis has been “hunting Holland for years” and Holland refers to him as a “legend.”

contrast this with the second flashback where holland thinks of vortalis as a “nobody” and a “thug.” obviously a few years have passed between the second and third flashback, but we are left to speculate how many.

the time between the fourth and fifth flashbacks is a few months. because in the fifth flashback (standing on the balcony, newly crowned) holland mentions meeting vortalis “months ago”.