Okay, I don't disagree that Animorphs is a children's book at all but... did Young Adult really not exist as a category until the mid 2000s?? I remember getting books (including animorphs!) from the young adult section as a kid in the 90s, and I can find references to a young adult section of the library in simpsons episodes from as early as 1994 (no links in asks, but s06e07). Is this another thing that changed when we shifted over to the Berenstain dimension??
Did Young Adult really not exist as a category until the mid 2000s?
Yes and no and yes and no. YA literature — as in stories that fit under the umbrella of “children’s” but are a distinct category for marketing, lit crit, publishing houses, etc. — did in fact develop gradually over time. Some of my local libraries* also had YA sections by the late 1990s, and school librarians were already marketing YA to teens for decades so that 16-year-olds wouldn’t feel like they were reading “kiddie” books. There are a bunch of other forces that go into the development of the YA label. I know the biggest one is the explosive popularity of Harry Potter, Twilight, and their ilk, but other than that I’ll have to ask @fandaliteacademy for her expertise and then get back to you.
I also want to emphasize that, when I call Animorphs children’s books, I am not making a statement about who should read them. They were written for a child audience, specifically a middle grade audience, and that’s all that classification reflects. I used to read YA literature in first grade; I read kids’ superhero comics today. I finished Dan Brown’s then-bibliography before I was out of elementary school; I’m currently a grown-ass adult still rereading Animorphs. The best books are the ones that anyone can read and enjoy regardless of age, and the only reason genres exist is to help people who love certain types of books to find more books that they’re likely to love.
Is this another thing that changed when we shifted over to the Berenstain dimension?
This is not a criticism of OP or anyone else who uses this meme, BUT — as a psychologist who studies misinformation and dates a psychologist who studies reading errors — the “Mandela effect” “Berensta/ein Bears” meme is like tin foil between my teeth. It comes from an extremely common memory error that only occurs within a particular cultural context that a few people have, with well-meaning but tone-deaf cultural cluelessness, attempted to apply to a human universal. This extremely common memory error is one of substituting one’s expectations for a memory into a slightly different memory that one has partially forgotten, in essence forgetting tiny details and then using an “average” response to fill in the gap.
Case in point: I know at least four people named Catharine, all of whom regularly get addressed or recorded as Catherine. I assume that most of you just had to go back and reread that last sentence to figure out what the fuck the difference is between Catherine and Catharine. That occurs because most contemporary English-speakers’ brains automatically read Catharine as Catherine. When we’re reading quickly, our eyes automatically skip over the middles of words and use memory-based expectations to fill in the gaps, and these days Catherine is far more common than Catharine. Tihs is aslo teh rseaon we cna siltl raed wrods wehn the ltetres aer mexid up, so it’s a damn useful mechanism. Catharine (have you spotted the difference yet?) is actually the original spelling, but it has since become archaic, with Catherine becoming more popular. Honestly, there’s no bigger societal issue underpinning the Catharine/Catherine confusion, so this means a few individual headaches for a few Catharines at the DMV, and that’s all. Sorry Catharines, but your issue is not as egregious as the Berenstein/Berenstain problem.
Because “Berenstain” is a culturally Jewish last name. And it’s the authors’ last name. And it’s a last name that comes from a Jewish tradition, not the non-Jewish Western-European tradition that informs more of the dominant culture in the U.S. and originates the expectation that last names are more likely to end in -stein than -stain. And a meme that suggests that this minor memory error has to be explained with A WHOLE OTHER FUCKING UNIVERSE rather than the human brain saving itself some effort by assuming that Berenstein, like Catherine, is the “normal” (WASP) default? Well, it sure as hell doesn’t mean to be othering to Jewish culture. Just like the “Mandela effect” doesn’t intend to be cringe-inducingly casual in its lack of South African cultural competency.
Again, nobody is doing this on purpose. Most people simply don’t realize that that’s what’s underpinning this effect, because it just took me a long psychobabble explanation of schema-based saccade patterns to explain why it makes me cringe. I’m not even saying that anyone should stop using either meme. Just that both are, somewhat unavoidably, a little bit culturally incompetent in the extent to which they use magical thinking to explain a fairly common symptom of living in WASP-dominated American culture.
