So this effectively boils down to a 'how old do you think the characters would look' thread; with the whole 'imagine they are humans'. Because there's some characters like Tewi who can be pinned as 10,000+; Mokou and Kaguya are at least multiple centuries.
I have probably ranted about this elsewhere, but I have this very personal headcanon regarding the infamous Alice ? Marisa ? Patchouli triangle. When it started to build, I had understood that Zun wanted to abandon the PC98 canon altogether (which seems not to be true), so I grew to see it like this:
Marisa is 15?16 when she first faces Alice, but it takes time before Alice can be honest about her feelings. Marisa is 17 at the very least when they develop a closer friendship. I assume this leads to some sort of romance, but I still cannot tell how that happens, and how soon. As for looks, Marisa has the face of a 17-year-old already by age 14, but after that she appears to age slower than average. Due to her relatively petite and slender body, many will still mistake her for a teenager when she?s 22.
Alice is by far the oldest of the three. She has been born to human parents, probably in the first half of the XVIII century or as early as the second half of the XVII century. However, over two centuries of (mostly) solitary life have caused some aspects of her emotional side to regress drastically ? she has stated herself, ?Long ago have I forgotten what it is to be human.? This makes the Alice ? Marisa pairing far less unlikely, yet it is a two-edged sword. Alice is longing to discover her feeling self again, but cannot help it that this also brings back memories from the decades when she was living an adult life as an aspiring witch. When it comes to looks, Alice appears to be around 25 years old, except in the moments when the look in her eyes is telling otherwise. She is almost as tall as an average British woman and has a proportionate body (possibly with some extra at the hips), which makes her look both tall and robust compared to the two other witches.
I used to think that Patchouli was just a bit over 100, perhaps 115 at the most, but I am on the way towards retconning that inside my head. My new theory is that her age might rather be between 120 and 145. Unlike Alice, she has never truly reached adulthood if we put any emphasis on emotional or social development. This is partially due to her being the only one of the trio who was not born human; partially due to her family background (it is not by chance that their surname is ?Knowledge?, not ?Wisdom?); and, perhaps most importantly, due to her being an exceptional case even within that family. This is not at all to say that she is stupid. When it comes to knowledge, she is
more than adult, plus she has a brilliant understanding of cause and effect, which lets her analyze her own emotional shortcomings in a way that would be out of reach for most teenagers. While clearly taller than Remilia, Patchy is so short that she easily makes you forget what a shorty Marisa is. Patchouli has an otherwise surprisingly healthy and young-looking skin, but her sickly paleness and frequent eyebags will distract you from that fact. She has something of a babyface combined with the most adult eyes of the trio. She might very well be the curviest of the witches, but her way of dressing does not exactly emphasize that. All of this makes it difficult to tell how old exactly she looks. Most would probably say: clearly older than Marisa but younger than Alice.
