#that doesn't necessarily mean it was before her banishment tho

[mournflame]

HEY WAIT Johanna knew Manfred before her banishment

[draconis-cantus]

Ok I'll try to keep this simple but inevitably fail. First of all tho, very very major spoilers for the ending of the first game. The short, spoiler-free answer is it's complicated and at this point pretty much up for interpretation, but depending on how you interpret certain things, it's probably fine.

Ok now the long and spoiler-laden answer: (tw for mentioning suicide, because this is Joshua we're getting into)

Starting off: Joshua is the Composer of Shibuya, the angel/god who runs the Reaper's Game in his district. He's been the Composer since before Neku's Game even started, and he killed Neku as part of a complicated plot/bet so he can die² and take his city down with him.

Joshua did all this because he's been Composer for, presumably, a while, and is fed up with the city's stagnation and isolation. (One could say a lot of that was Joshua projecting his criticisms of himself onto the city, or the city itself was influenced by his emotional state because he never stopped being a suicidal loner after he died and if anything only got more mentally unwell, but that's neither here nor there.)

Up there I said "a while." Megumi, his second-in-command, even says that he's served Joshua for "a long time." Joshua takes the form of a 15-year-old boy for the duration of the Game, but has presumably existed for longer than 15 years.

In his Composer form, Joshua is stated to look older, but tuning down gives him a younger appearance, and later books refer to Joshua's Composer form as his "adult form."

Ok, so he's an adult that just looks like a kid? That makes all those times he flirted with Neku during Week 2 and Another Day, as well as all those times he got in reeeeal close to Neku like he was about to kiss him in the anime a bit...hmmmmm............uh. Gross. Bad. Ew. Well, the thing is: he also might not have been an adult.

Wait, but didn't I just say Joshua has existed for a while longer than 15 years? Well, thing is: he's dead. Dead people in TWEWY don't usually age (with exceptions in NEO but it's not explained how so we're gonna ignore that part for now). Undead characters have an "apparent age," which is the age they were when they died as well as the age they remain physically, mentally, and emotionally. They can acquire new knowledge and skills, but they never "grow up." An example is Shoka Sakurane in the second game. She died at 16, 4 years before NEO. As of NEO, she's still 16 four years later. (If this is confusing, think of it like this: a little ghost girl has been haunting a place for 50 years. Would you still consider her a little girl? Probably.)

Also, having an "adult form" doesn't necessarily mean he's an adult. It means that when he's hiding his identity to his underlings, he assumes the appearance of an adult. His RG appearance, that of the 15yo Joshua, is considered his true identity.

Adding on to that: in NEO, Joshua, after having been banished to the RG for 3 years, is now visibly older. In an art book for NEO, characters' ages and birthdates are listed, with Joshua's apparent age listed as 18. Joshua's specific page states that Nomura considered using Joshua's adult form from TWEWY, but decided that he wanted his age to match with Neku.

Ok. So in TWEWY, was Joshua, for all intents and purposes, 15? Or was he not? Uh............the more you look into it and think about how the lore of TWEWY works, the less clear-cut the answer seems to become. Fandom folks these days usually just sigh and say it's up for interpretation. I'm 10000000% all for that because...well, you just saw that monster of a post.

So if someone ships joshneku, they probably are of a mind that he was 15ish/his age is up to interpretation, and/or they're both at least 18 as of NEO so it doesn't matter anymore.

CAN SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN THE JOSHNEKU AGE DISCOURSE TO ME …?? Im a pretty new twewy fan and am extremely confused.