#millennial bashing

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.”