Because turning 18 doesn't magically mean you know what you're doing.

I love coming-of-age stories.

There’s something inherently compelling about throwing a character into a world they don’t fully understand and forcing them to figure out who they are while everything around them goes spectacularly wrong.

Fantasy is particularly good at this.

Unfortunately for fantasy protagonists, “figuring yourself out” often happens while being chased by monsters, discovering ancient magic, accidentally starting wars, or learning that some obscure prophecy written three thousand years ago is suddenly their problem.

But when I started writing The Staff of the Dagda, I didn’t want my protagonist to be sixteen.

Or seventeen.

Or even eighteen.

Liam O’Kean is 21.

And that was very deliberate.

Because as much as I enjoy coming-of-age stories, I’m increasingly interested in what happens immediately after the traditional teenage coming-of-age story ends.

You’re technically an adult.

Congratulations.

Now what the hell are you supposed to do?

Your Early Twenties Are Their Own Coming-of-Age Story

There’s a weird assumption that coming of age ends somewhere around eighteen.

You graduate high school. Maybe you go to university. Maybe you get a job. Maybe you move out.

Achievement unlocked: Adulthood.

Except that’s obviously not how it works.

Your early twenties can be some of the most transitional years of your life.

You’re making decisions about careers. You’re navigating serious relationships. You’re paying bills. You might be living on your own for the first time. You’re learning that groceries cost an obscene amount of money and apparently you’re responsible for buying toilet paper forever now.

And, crucially, people start expecting you to know what you’re doing.

That’s what fascinates me about New Adult characters.

They have independence without necessarily having experience.

They can make their own decisions, but they’re also discovering that those decisions have consequences. Nobody necessarily has the authority to stop them from doing something stupid anymore.

That doesn’t mean they stop doing stupid things.

It just means the stupid things can get considerably bigger.

Which, as a fantasy writer, is tremendously useful.

I Want My Characters Making Adult Choices

One of the reasons I gravitate toward New Adult fantasy is that I want my characters dealing with adult problems.

That doesn’t mean New Adult is simply YA with more violence, sex, alcohol, or profanity.

For me, the difference is more fundamental.

A teenage protagonist is often approaching adulthood from the outside. They’re starting to figure out what kind of person they want to become.

A New Adult protagonist has crossed that arbitrary line society has drawn around adulthood and discovered there isn’t actually anything on the other side.

No manual.

No tutorial.

No wise NPC waiting to explain the controls.

You just get considerably more freedom and considerably more responsibility at roughly the same time.

That changes the kinds of choices characters can make.

They can leave.

They can stay.

They can destroy relationships.

They can make terrible financial decisions.

They can choose who they want in their lives.

And when something supernatural comes crashing through the door, there isn’t necessarily an adult standing behind them who is supposed to handle it.

They’re the adult.

Good luck.

Twenty-One Is a Terrible Age to Save the World

That’s part of what made Liam interesting to me when I started writing The Staff of the Dagda.

At 21, he’s old enough that we can reasonably expect him to take responsibility for himself.

But hand him enormous supernatural responsibility?

That feels a little unfair.

Perfect.

Liam is trying to navigate a life that would already be complicated without Celtic mythology suddenly becoming extremely real.

Then the impossible happens, and he has to deal with consequences that are wildly disproportionate to his level of experience.

That combination gives me exactly the kind of protagonist I like writing.

He isn’t a child who needs adults to save him.

He also isn’t a seasoned 40-year-old badass who has spent twenty years preparing for this exact situation.

He’s somewhere in between.

He has enough agency to make meaningful decisions and enough inexperience to occasionally make the wrong ones.

That’s where things get interesting.

New Adult Lets My Fantasy Get a Little Grittier

I’ve written before about why I like my fantasy a little gritty.

I like danger to feel dangerous.

I like supernatural creatures to be frightening.

I like victories that cost something.

I like characters who get hurt, screw up, argue with each other, make questionable decisions, and occasionally realize they are catastrophically out of their depth.

New Adult gives me room to explore that while keeping something I really enjoy about younger protagonists: discovery.

There’s still wonder.

There’s still adventure.

There’s still the feeling that the world is much bigger and stranger than the protagonist ever imagined.

It’s just paired with adult consequences.

That balance is important to me.

I don’t particularly want to write relentlessly bleak fantasy where everyone is miserable, hope is an embarrassing character flaw, and somebody gets decapitated every fourteen pages.

But I also don’t want to protect my characters from the uglier parts of their worlds.

New Adult gives me a comfortable place between those extremes.

I Still Love What YA Does Well

None of this is meant as an argument against YA.

I like a lot of the things YA fiction does exceptionally well.

YA can have incredible momentum. Its characters often experience enormous personal change. Relationships matter intensely. Discoveries feel enormous because the characters are encountering so many things for the first time.

I want some of that DNA in my books.

I just want to move the characters a few years forward.

Because I'm fascinated by what happens after the point where a traditional coming-of-age story might end.

What happens when you've supposedly come of age but still haven't figured yourself out?

What happens when everyone starts treating you like an adult before you feel remotely qualified for the position?

What happens when your mistakes are entirely yours now?

And because I write fantasy:

What happens when we add monsters?

Adulthood Doesn't Come With a Tutorial

That might be the central question underneath a lot of the stories I enjoy writing:

What happens when someone who barely knows how to handle ordinary adulthood suddenly has to handle something extraordinary?

There’s something wonderfully unfair about that setup.

Your early twenties can already feel like somebody has dropped you into an open-world game without explaining the controls.

You’re building relationships, figuring out work, learning independence, making mistakes, and slowly assembling some idea of the person you want to be.

Then imagine discovering that mythology is real.

Or that monsters exist.

Or that somebody has handed you a magical weapon and informed you that you have much bigger problems than figuring out how you're going to pay rent this month.

That’s the storytelling territory I keep coming back to.

Characters who are adults, but only just.

Characters with agency, but not necessarily wisdom.

Characters trying to figure out who they are while the supernatural world gives them absolutely no time to do it.

That’s why I write New Adult fantasy.

Because turning eighteen might make you an adult on paper.

But it sure as hell doesn't mean you know what you're doing.