Thread:Silver-Haired Seireitou/@comment-8914761-20150226031639/@comment-2089817-20150226033622

Everybody has their own way of explaining it, since it's extremely ambiguous thanks to Kubo, but the way I've been going with it is that aging is linked to one's mentality.

So, let's see... Are you familiar with the eight stages of development by Eric Erikson? It's an idea that there are stages in a human's life that we pass through as we get older, and we must meet certain prerequisites before moving on to the next stage. Usually, those prerequisites are "virtues" or realizations that we come upon in our trek through life. Now, of course, for humans who have mortal bodies, it doesn't matter what their mentalities are since their bodies obviously have to age and eventually decay. But for spirits, I believe that their mentality directly influences the rate in which their body ages. Or at least plays a huge factor. Spiritual power probably also plays a big role in their aging too. Those that have been scarred through traumatic experiences, at least in my book, make it possible for a stunt in their growth to be made. Traumatic experiences make it hard to move to the next stages of one's life since their stuck in the past, and therefore, I'd consider it meaning that their age would slow down severely. I think this might possibly explain why Unohana still looks so young after a thousand years, since she felt empty inside after her fight with Zaraki and the lack of strong adversaries afterwards, while Yamamoto has aged severely from a thousand years ago as he progressed in a peaceful environment after the defeat of the Quincy back then.

I'd recommend you discuss this stuff with Void, since he'd be able to give you a really good run-through of how this aging stuff would work out.