Currently Warbling

unique to gen z

universal to gen z

like i remember at my high school graduation one guy gave this big speech about how it was Our Job To Fix The World! it was up to us now to solve climate change and everything! which annoyed the hell out of me for a number of reasons, the major one being that we were a bunch of 18 year olds. this was a grown man. talking about so many extremely complex issues which fundamentally require solidarity amongst so many people, across generations, long-term, to "fix."

its an extension of how ageism dehumanizes children by projecting "innocence" onto them, depriving them of the right to be messy and imperfect and growing humans, turning them into objects that adults can project a desire for purity and salvation onto. it connects directly to the belief that social progress is inevitable, that younger generations will be more accepting and intelligent not because of intergenerational efforts to strive for a better world but because young people are supposed to make up for all the mistakes of their parents through that intrinsic "innocence."

and then, when that illusion inevitably shatters, when young people are people with flaws and anxieties and normal human issues, when it becomes clear that the youth will not save the previous generations from everything in the world they are scared and ashamed of, the ageism doesn't go away. it transmogrifies. the "innocence" of youth is reimagined as young people (particularly teenagers) being a corrupting force, no longer the embodiment of adult hopes but adult fears.

So like, with the stars dying, I'm thinking Eridian media might have gone on a whole "aliens are bad bad bad out there killing stars and wanting to eat Erid" and etc trend for their sci-fi. Long ballads about what are essentially evil Eridians with the equivalent of prosthetics doing terrible things to the galaxy and brave heroes like Rocky going off to stop them. Because y'know that's probably how you'd conceptualize a huge scary conflict like total cosmic annihilation in a way that makes it seem beatable: designate a bad guy you can just defeat in order to stop it.

But then Grace and Rocky get to Erid and that trend gets immediately flipped. Turns out that there were kind of bad aliens, the astrophage and all, but that's more like a natural disaster, and hero Rocky has returned with the weirdest, nicest alien ever. Erid media suddenly rockets back to a prior era of optimistic sci-fi previously considered intolerably twee and cringe after the solar disaster kicked off, where the aliens are always nice nice nice, incredibly weird and sometimes goofy as fuck but friendly and not the bad guys.

Of course you never get full consensus on these things, so there are also creative Eridians who are like. But what if evil humans question? Evil humans posing as saviors infiltrate Erid and replace Eridians with pods that hatch into creepy non-Erid rock monsters question? Evil human comes to Erid under guise of niceness and KILLS Eridians question???

Which is broadly considered like. Holy shit dude stop being gauche the nice alien saved the planet stop fucking writing stories where his skeleton cracks open like a nest of evil eggs and turns into a bunch of monsters! Rude, statement! Aliens very nice statement!

And like at first all the Eridian scientists are very sure to keep this sort of stuff away from Grace, they don't want to insult him or imply that he's being slandered in their media or anything. And again overall the popular trend turns a lot more to aliens-as-friendly, especially if they're expressly humans, and the sci-fi writers of Erid are having a total BLAST speculating about Earth and writing stories about it and etc, Grace seems to very much enjoy answering questions for the ones who want to keep things accurate and chuckling and enthusing over the creativity of the ones who don't. He's like, oh yeah they are definitely also doing this back on Earth, don't worry.

Researchers laughing and nervously just being like, yes of course, this is the full extent of it, not to worry! Normal thing which humans are also doing!

Until one day Rocky just brings Grace a recording of a full-blown Eridian horror sci-fi where Grace HIMSELF is EXPLICITLY a horrible monster that goes on a killing spree and tries to destroy Erid.

The other researchers are losing their shit. RoCKY?!?! WHY QUESTION??? Oh fuck Grace is going to be so upset! He's such a sensitive soul he doesn't even like it when one of his students gets distressed!