itt: me crying over untamed ages and trying to figure out how old they are bc this drama doesn't make anything concrete. all ages listed are wwx's, since he's the central character and many of the main cast are around his age anyway, give or take a year or so.

untamed's characters are aged up slightly from the original novel due to timeline weirdness (for example, untamed adds an entirely new story arc and lengthens a 13-year timeskip to 16 years), and censorship stuff.

i headcanon that wwx is at least 18yo in the cloud recesses study arc, the youngest he was outside of the brief childhood scenes, because before the making and airing of the drama (first released in 2019), underage drinking was banned from being portrayed onscreen, and yet wwx drank a lot of alcohol. 18 is the legal drinking/purchasing age in china and has been since the 2000's.

however! an argument can also be made for them having been 20 in the cloud recesses arc because 20 was the age of majority for men in ancient china, and untamed is historical fiction with male protagonists. fantasy historical fiction but historical nonetheless, as tends to be the thing with wuxia and xianxia. if this turns out to be true, then we can assume that the ages i listed below get bumped up by 2.

cloud recesses arc: 18
yin iron roadtrip: just turned 19, cloud recesses arc spans a year and he didn't get kicked out unlike in the book
wen indoctrination: 19
lotus pier attack & start of sunshot: 19, almost 20
end of sunshot: 20 bc that spanned a few months

wwx was thrown into the burial mounds just before the start and returned after 3 months. as soon as he returned, he asks everyone to wait 1 month for his big anti-wrh powers reveal. he hadn't revealed them yet before nmj gets captured and had to reveal it then so it was probably less than a month later.

baifeng mountain hunt & start of yllz era: 20-21

happens during autumn of that same year so either he was about to have a bday or just had it

jl's birth: 21-22
wwx death: about 1 month older than he was when jl was born. funnily enough, about the same age as in the novel

[ INSERT 16-YEAR TIMESKIP ]

return: 37-38, physically whatever age mo xuanyu was

mxy seems mid- to late- 20's. with just the base numbers we're given, if he was taken to the jin sect at 13 and then kicked out 16 years later, then he'd be 29, which is the oldest possible age he could be. we just don't know how long after wwx's death he was taken by the jin sect, how long he'd been there, and how much time passed between him being expelled and him summoning wwx, so he could be younger. i maintain that he was mid-20's at the youngest.

final ep: about the same, eps 33-50 are squished into 2-3 months (same length of time as in the novel)