Workshopping some... colt-land-gentry-ken (???) sibling stuff. Mostly explaining The Name Situation + ages. Contains spoilers for most of their movies!
Basically, my thinking here is that Gentry was their dad's surname, and Grace was their mother's maiden name. After the patricide, she got all their names changed back to her maiden name (except Court, who was yk, in jail at that point, and didn't get the opportunity to)
Sometime later (2000≤), their mom meets a new guy, surname Seavers. Colt loves this name, he thinks it's the coolest ever, begs and begs and BEGS his mom to let him change his name. Which was, as you can imagine, super awkward when the relationship was on the newer side, but their relationship did end up lasting. In his late teens/young adulthood (right around the beginning of his career) he changed his name to Colt Grace-Seavers to have a cool stage name of sorts while also keeping his mother's.
And then Ken's full first name is Kendall. Because get it. Ken Doll
In The Gray Man, it states right at the beginning of the movie that he was born in 1980 and that he was convicted in 1995. The bulk of the movie is set in 2021.
The Fall Guy was released in 2024, but doesn't give much information regarding what year it's set in, or Colt's age, so this makes it wayyy easier to directly tie his age + timeline to Ryland's because twins.
Now, Project Hail Mary is where I did most of The Maths (because... duh). Most of this information is found in the book, so spoilers for that as well!
At the end of the book, Ryland mentions being about 53, and that he had lived on Erid for 16 years (these are in Earth years, since they're written out in English instead of Eridian, and all other numbers mentioned in this chapter are written in the Eridian script/format). Which means he was 37 when he arrived at Erid, and it takes 3 Earth years to travel between Tau Ceti and Erid, so he was 34 during the bulk of the story, and since travel between Tau Ceti and Earth was 3 years 9 months and he spent several months at Tau Ceti working to solve the Astrophage issue, I'm just gonna say the full time amounted to about 4 years and he was 30 on launch.
I've seen some people use 2025 or 2026 as the launch year for the Hail Mary, but I'm gonna do something a little different for a couple reasons: 1) If Ryland was 30 in 2025, this means he was born in 1995, and neither him nor Colt would have gotten to spend any time with Court and 2) Ken, who is younger, would not have been conceived. So instead of using either of those dates, I instead opted to use 2021 (the year the book was published) as the launch year, meaning he and Colt would have been born in 1991. They still wouldn't have gotten to spend much time with Court, but I feel as though some is better than none. They'll remember him, if only vaguely. Kinda makes it more tragic, right?
And then, there's the Barbie movie. Which is... set in Barbieland. So Ken gives me a lot of wiggle-room, story-wise. He doesn't have an age in the movie of course, so I went ahead with him being conceived prior to their dad's death and birthed after, in 1996. He never got a chance to know Court, or their father (though that one's probably for the best).
(I have a pretty strong image of interpreting the Barbie movie in this as sort of like... his college years? And there's a whole fraternity/sorority thing going on lmao. I've also been debating throwing Elle Woods in there as well, for Fun, even though the timelines don't line up At All)
I'm about ready to wrap this up but before I go, I'm just gonna mention really quick that they grew up in Florida, since that makes the most sense (Court was in Florida State Prison at the beginning of his movie, Colt is implied to have worked on Miami Vice in his because of his jacket). They mostly ended up gravitating across the country to California though.
Anyways thank you for reading all my yapping :) I'll be using these ideas as a sort of baseline connected backstory for any fic I write. There's definitely more but nothing nearly as set-in-stone and this is long enough as-is so I'll just hold onto those for now
