Sooo..... how old is she? In the start of the show, she's apparently 8 years old according to some wikipedia pages. But around season 3, she's acting like a teenager. So how old is she by the end of the show? How many years does TFA take place in, during the start and end of the show?
One year. I'm going to assume you didn't see the first three episodes of Animated Season 3, which deals with the 'age discrepancy' you're talking about. It's a major game changer in the plot so I'm dancing around spoilers here, but let's just say Prof. Sumdac had a very good reason for initially not letting his daughter out of the Tower much until the 'bots arrived.
Ah no dont worry, I saw it years ago, so I know what happens, just not too specifically. I don't remember the age discrepancy though, so that's interesting haha
Spoiler: Spoilers enabled for anybody who hasn't seen it She uses the key on herself, triggers what could be called 'instant puberty', and doubles in height so she would probably be like, physically age 16.
To answer your questions without major spoilers, the show takes place in all of one year, maybe two. If you want the reason for the sudden age discrepancy, I've put the plot twist in spoilers below. Spoiler: The Secret of Sari Sumdac At the beginning of the show, she's around eight years of age. However, during the finale of Season 2, it's revealed that she's not human at all... she's Techno-Organic, a Cybertronian with an organic alternate mode. In this case, her father Isaac Sumdac stumbled across a small Cybertronian protoform in his lab, and on touching the protoform it absorbed his DNA, becoming a human infant. He then "adopted" the child and raised it as his own. In the first few episodes of Season 3, Sari wants to join the Autobots in their exploits, having come to terms with her nature, but she's left behind on account of still being too young and unprepared. Frustrated, Sari realized that if she wants to join her friends... then maybe what she needs is an upgrade. Using the key gifted to her by the AllSpark on herself, Sari accelerated her own aging process until she was about 16 years of age, both physically and mentally, while also granting herself multiple new weapons and tools, and unlocking the power to transform into her robot mode. But in doing so, she completely drained the key's power into herself; she couldn't control the power, which caused her to lose control of her own body, and she would have overloaded and exploded with the force of an atom bomb if Ratchet didn't use his EMP to shut her down. Afterwards, most of her weapons and AllSpark-saturated circuitry was disconnected, but she kept her new teenage form. So, she effectively doubled her age and forced herself to enter early stages of maturity all at once. She probably didn't even foresee the consequences, herself.
That's kind of a loaded question with a far more complicated answer than should be necessary. The episode Sound and Fury was literally set around her "Birthday" that being said I can't remember if she was said to be 8 before that episode and was turning 9 or if she had just turned 8 in that episode and there for would of been 7 before that. But yes she was said to be around 8 years old at some point. She doesn't just act like a teenager. She physically is about 16 years old... however by that point in the series we know she's a robot and she used the AllSpark to upgrade herself to that form. It's not like they did a sudden time jump in the 3rd season and this is where we get to the complicated part of the question cause assuming the "Birthday" episode actually corresponds to the number of years since her Protoform was activated that means she's STILL only 8 or 9 years old despite her teenage appearance. There's also the possibility that since Sari looked like an 8 year old and was usually kept separate from other children, being home schooled and stuff... that she's had multiple 8th Birthday parties... but that seems a little unlikely... I mean we've seen that she can age and it's unlikely that even being kept separate from other children that Sari wouldn't of known she was a robot long before she did if she kept turning 8 every year. Well we only see one actual Birthday, one Halloween, and one Christmas go by on screen... It's possible that more than one year happens and we just didn't see multiple specials... Actually the Halloween episode is the one directly before Sari's Birthday and the air dates don't seem to correspond in the real world with when the episodes take place in universe... cause obviously Halloween is in October but that episode aired in February so this doesn't actually indicate that Sari's Birthday is literally right after Halloween. I don't recall exactly what the Christmas episode was... I just remember one of the Autobots being wrapped in Christmas Lights for an episode. I might of been when Megatron gets his body back cause Issac did find it in the snow. Anyway... there are some people who have looked through other cartoons checking for any in universe clues as to when the date is even checking the weather for the location where the show takes place... in this case we're specifically told that Animated is set in Detroit... and using that information to estimate approximately when each episode is happening... That said... I personally don't have the time to check through every episode and research the weather patterns in Detroit to make a more accurate guess as to exactly how much time actually passes between the start and end of the series. But based on what information I do know without doing all that research it seems like it all takes place within a year... not including flash backs of course... and a lot of those Flash Backs take place before Sari was even active so they wouldn't factor into her age anyway.
Technically, I think we see two Christmases go by, since Isaac recovers Megatron's body in the winter, and Sari is still eight then, but when she becomes 16, it's no longer winter. And then after that we see another Christmas.
From what I understood, she should be nine at the end of the show, with her birthday somewhere in November. She's seven at the beginning and turns eight at her birthday episode, Sound and Fury. Three episodes later, we get Nature Calls, which is set in the winter, making early November the most likely date for her birthday as it is immediately after Along Came a Spider, which is set on Halloween. Considering that we don't get another winter episode until Human Error, it's pretty safe to say that she should be nine at that point. BTW: This also means the poor kid was technically homeless for almost a year.
Welcome to the boards! That's a concise way of putting it, and yes she technically should be between 8 and 9 years old, in terms of absolute age.
