The Problem I Always Had With People Saying Lloyd Is 23 Or Something In Dragons Rising BUT Mentally He's

The problem i always had with people saying Lloyd is 23 or something in dragons rising BUT mentally he's like 18

Or in Controversallized, he's 18 but mentally 16 or whatever,

Is that MENTAL AGE IS NOT LINEAR GUYS

I feel like people miss this and maturity as a concept.

Longer rant below

It was true at the beginning when he got aged up that he was ~8-10mentally and ~14physically, and for a while it was linear maybe, but mental age is more complex than a thing that follows your birthdays, take examples from real life.

A child under pressure, responsibility and a role they have to be forced to fill, with the addition of trauma will mature differently and faster.

Just like when a kid is stripped away from their family in real life, maybe due to war, abuse or financial reasons, the kid must learn the skills of older ages to manipulate their sourroundings to help them survive. That's forced maturity and a childhood lost.

People could be well in their 30s and have an 18yo more mature than them, its all about the conditions of growing up, and what hardships they had to adapt to.

Also, think about this: What does it even mean to be a specific age mentally? How does a mentally 23 yo differ from a mentally 18 yo person? Its very relative...

We can maybe see Lloyd act more unmature and childish than the others in pre oni trilogy seasons, but ultimately always trying to seem wiser than he actually was because then it was true that he got aged up, and his mental age didn't follow up for a while, but still maturity was expected of him. However i feel like that gradually fades away as we go further, and i firmly believe that his mental age has caught up to his physical a long time ago.

Even if tomorrow's tea never happened, he'd be more mature than his age due to the experiences he's lived through.

Also, mental age is NOT linear to behavioural skills.

The tomorrow's tea left effects on his social skills and behaviour, only because in addition to a fucked up early childhood, he literally skipped the late childhood development stages, arguably the most important one for learning social cues and learning to build connections, in addition to immediately being put into a situation of great responsibility, forcing him to learn all the skipped skills afterwards. And this arguably wasn't because he got aged up, it was the events he got put into. We can also see this in real life with people who were forced to grow up too fast.

If you were to make conversation with an adult who lacks certain aspects of social skills due to reasons, you wouldn't say they are unmature. You'd probably think they are maybe autistic, but not unmature.

And developmental holes are probably the source of many of his issues later on, like trust issues (on both ends, (w Pythor, Harumi, Akita, Garmadon post res), the inability to properly express empathy (DR s3pt1 when reacting to Arin's parent's death), or isolation in crisis (DR, Controversallized, Oni trilogy, Splinter in the Blind Man's Eye,...), and many others.

But these are NOT tied to maturity.

It's simply the effects (and mental health problems) due to one's development.

I'm not gonna go into the psychological aspect of the opposite, when people return to their childhood preferences/behavioural patterns after adulthood because they miss what they didn't have, because that is a different topic.

That being said people can still act younger in times, but thats normal, even healthy, and i'm all for preserving youthfullness. Heck i literally work in a club/bar but will play minecraft and build ninjago sets afterwards. If i see a cool bug i will pick it up and show it around, but that doesn't mean i won't be reliable at work or solve that differential equation for uni projects. Maturity is also the ability to act according to situation.

So... Now that i diverged this much

I don't believe that, and at the very least in dragons rising, that his mental age would be younger than his actual physical self. I believe after all the ninja went through, they long are all more mature than what an average person would be at their age.

And i hope to see that more highlighted in DR with Sora and Arin, (maybe even Wyfy). Sora was forced to mature a bit more than Arin was growing up, and that is apparent among them, with Arin acting like a typical ~15yo, while sora acts more young adult like. But I'm sure the pre ninja Arin and the Arin we'll get after s3 will be very different. Not because the passing of time, but the mental maturity he gained due to experiences (not necessarily positive ones).

But change my mind i guess

Welp, thx for reading my ramble, here is a potato