A:

It’s funny you ask that, because I have been thinking about that! I woke up at like 5:45 when my phone buzzed because of the update tweet, and I just kind of skimmed the update on my phone in my half-asleep state, just looking at the pictures. And when I saw the timeline, my first thought was, “…Oh fuck, does this mean that Bro and Mom are supposed to be the same age?”

So of course then I couldn’t fall back asleep for like another hour so I started thinking about it. And I’ve decided that it won’t affect my headcanon too much. Because the fact that their babies were sent to the same “time period,” which to me is probably about a span of a ten years, doesn’t necessarily mean that they arrived in the same year. Because technically the original kids didn’t all arrive in the same year — Dave, Rose, and Jade arrived on Earth in December 1995, while John didn’t land until April 1996. So despite the fact that the year was technically different, he’s still in the same exact position as the other three. So I’m taking the timeline with a grain of salt, and I think that the two guardians in question still could viably have been born in the same time period, but with a little three year gap between them — because to me, that’s about the difference in their ages. I guess this would be a good time to talk about my guardian headcanons. Of course, this is all complete speculation since we know nothing about what happened to the guardians after they crash-landed on their meteors, but based on what we know of them, this is my thoughts on their background — and this is also the background headcanon I use for writing HWHAP too.

Shoot, I forgot you can’t use Read Mores when answering asks. Oh well, here goes.

First of all, my belief is that all of the guardians are all pretty young, because they’re all single parents, and I feel like if they were older and more at a “parent age” when they found their respective kids, there would have been a greater chance of them being married and whatnot. I’ve already touched on my Bro thoughts before, but I might as well restate it for the record: I don’t think Bro had a true family growing up. I don’t think anyone took him in when he landed on earth, and so he got stuck in foster care and spent his entire childhood being shuffled around from one house to another, and he didn’t have a very good experience at any of those places. Nobody wanted to keep him under their roof very long. His only family growing up was Lil’ Cal, who was the world to him. A lot of his bizarre eccentricities as an adult developed out of his childhood — he’s so attached to Cal because he’s all he had to call his own, and his love for puppets stemmed out of how close he was with his original puppet. His obsession with being cool goes hand in hand with his thing for weapons and ninja badassery, which he developed for self-defense purposes. He got picked on a lot for being a weird little kid who carried a puppet around with him everywhere and had no real home, and he wanted to show everyone that he could be cool too, so he started leaving Cal in his locker and studying martial arts so he could both protect himself physically from bullies and take up a new, cool hobby. He keeps food in the closet because that’s the only place where he could keep food that he actually wanted to eat after getting stuck with a pair of health nut foster parents who disapproved of his eating habits. And he keeps weapons in the freezer because… he’s a freak and thinks it’s a great storage space, and cold weapons are even more lethal. xD And also because he wigs out foster parents who he doesn’t like that way. He’s a bit of a practical jokester when you really think about it, like that time when he boobytrapped Dave with the smuppet pile. But I’m getting off-topic. Anyway, long story short, I think that Bro had a bizarre, unstable childhood and was 18 years old when Dave entered his life — which is part of the reason why he identifies as his big brother, because he thinks that he’s too young to be a dad.

Mom, on the other hand, appears to have had a much different upbringing. I think she landed on Earth three years before Bro did, making her 21 when Rose landed. Unlike Bro, who lives in a shitty little apartment (all of the money that he gets from the puppet porn site goes towards food and supporting his and Dave’s expensive hobbies), she is rich as fuck and lives in a huge-ass mansion. So I think that she was taken in by a rich, but loving, couple. She grew up with an adoptive mother and father who doted on her and catered to her every whim. They were both scientists themselves, which led to her later career at the Skaianet lab nearby. They also had a well-stocked bar and turned a blind eye to when she started raiding it as a teenager. Both her adoptive parents died before Rose’s “birth,” however, leaving her parentless but with a huge family fortune. Which she then proceeded to spend on alcohol and wizard paraphernalia because fuck the system Lalondes do what they want. So when Rose landed, she was only 21 years old, tipsy as hell, and familyless and in need of love. In her drunken state, she thought it would be a great idea to raise a baby girl, so she took Rose in and showered her with affection, which Rose later took to be a gesture of passive-aggressiveness, and thus began their passive-aggressive family war.

Dad, of course, is the only guardian with a normal background because he was born normally and didn’t arrive on Earth as an ectobaby riding in on a frigging meteor. When Nanna married an Egbert, he was the natural result of that and grew up with a legit mother, although his father did die before John’s arrival, maybe around the time that he was in high school or so. He was 23 when John landed (and killed his mother, oops), fresh out of business school, and he became a single father, raising John as his own son. He always wanted to be a dad anyway.

So here’s the rundown: When Bro found Dave, he was 18 years old, fresh out of high school, and recently escaped the foster system, living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment and working at a seedy convenience store to make ends meet. Dad was 23 and had recently finished business school and was looking into entering the corporate world when John’s meteor landed and destroyed the family joke shop, where he had been working in the meantime. Mom was 21 when Rose landed, living off of the fortune left to her by her deceased adoptive parents, and beginning research under an illustrious member at the Skaianet Laboratory, whom she soon outstripped, becoming a well-renowned scientist in her own right. They were all young, but they all chose to become single parents and raise their respective kids in their own respective ways.

And thus ends my sermon. Basically, I was a little adklslgsg over the update at first and what it meant for the guardian’s ages, but I think that even with Bro and Mom being sent to the same window of time, there is room for there to be that three-year age gap that I believe there is. Just looking at them, I can’t see them both being the exact same age, so I think there is the slightest age difference between the two of them despite belonging to the same time period.

_{Oops this turned into a novel again I’m sorry this is why you shouldn’t ask me questions.}