Apr 11, 2020
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Honestly, a lot of the “millennial vs. boomer” Discourse to me sounds kind of “class struggle”-y and based off the fact that if you are roughly middle class - people who have been around for a while tend to be a little more financially stable than those who are newly adults and didn’t have the right to control their money until a few years ago.
And then instead of looking at those issues, it completely re-frames it as a generation thing. And completely erases the existence and contributions of working-class elders. >.<
bookworm-forever-always said: Im curious…..why do you think this version of the Animorphs wont accept the responsiblity when their teenage versions do?
It’s true: in this AU, I take a pretty unflattering view of the 23-year-old Animorphs, especially Jake and Tobias. There were a couple different reasons I decided to do that. The super-practical boring reasons: I didn’t want to do a note-for-note repeat either of canon or of my earlier adult AU, and I thought that (since it’s fairly realistic for a set of 20somethings to be low in group coherence) that could be an excuse for me to speculate about what would happen if the Animorphs didn’t answer the call.
The more complex reasons? The first is that, as someone who is very close to that age herself (and who has several dozen peers also close to that age) I tend to see a lot of the good, the bad, the ugly, the brilliant, and the shockingly entitled at that age. If I had to characterize this age from my limited range of experiences, I would call it one of simultaneous inappropriate certainty and fake it ‘til you make it. There are a lot of people my age who show really firm convictions that their political views, personal philosophies, understandings of world systems, and insight into human nature have all crystalized, to the point where they don’t anticipate experiencing any ethical or philosophical shifts at any point from here on out. Simultaneously, there’s what Tumblr calls the “how to adult” effect where people at this age are desperately trying to figure out who to marry, whether to have kids, what jobs they want and how to get those jobs, where to live, what standard of living they can and should have, etc. Most of us have figured out that the whole “follow your dreams and it’ll all work out” line of advice leaves its adherents with useless college degrees and no job prospects, but most of us are also not sure what the alternatives are. Ergo, that all struck me as a perfect storm for Animorphs of that age to be more concerned with keeping themselves alive than with haring off on some uncertain adventure. The 13-year-old Animorphs are young enough that they genuinely don’t know what they’re getting themselves into; my headcanon is that the 33-year-old Animorphs are old enough to be duty-bound to protect others over themselves. We 23-year-olds are often so busy trying to figure out the difference between dish soap and dish detergent we have a tendency to be atrociously bad at listening when someone tells us “dude, you need to change.”
The final reason that I went cynical with that particular ask was out of a desire to buck the trend in fan fiction of (and again I’m being super-cynical here) bringing the mountain to Mohammed if Mohammed can’t go to the mountain when it comes to self-insert fan fiction. What I mean by that is that there’s this significant tendency to take works with unfamiliar settings and to recast them in more-familiar settings in fan fiction. For instance, there are lots of stories where characters have superpowers (Avatar, X-Men, Teen Wolf, etc.) with tons of fic AUs that imagine the characters without superpowers, stories with primarily business settings and middle adult characters (Avengers, Mercy Thompson, Angel, etc.) with tons of fic AUs that imagine the characters as young adults in high school or college, stories that either started out as or have become historical fiction (Animorphs, Harry Potter, The Book Thief, etc.) whose fandoms have dozens of modern AUs. What’s striking, however, is that it’s very rare to see any of these AUs the other way around—people rarely write versions of Teen Wolf set in the 1990s, or imagine that the characters of Harry Potter are middle-aged businesspeople. Sherlock and Harry Potter get American AUs on the American-run AO3; if Buffy and X-Men get British AUs then I haven’t seen them on AO3. It’s a natural human impulse to ask “what if the characters came to my setting?”—and an equally natural impulse to make those beloved individuals excel in that setting. After all, you never see college AUs where characters fail all their classes, or high school AUs where the protagonists become catty or bullying, just like there’s no coffee shop AU on the planet that ends with the coffee shop going out of business the way 90% of food-and-beverage startups do within the first year. Ergo, I wanted to fight against that tendency to self-insert many fans’ settings to a different cast of characters and then have the characters miraculously excel to a one when dropped into that new setting.
Blaming youths whatever the context
Don’t forget the vote last night to fuck undergrad and graduate students