  "Attractor" solutions for the pre-hydrodynamic, far-from-equilibrium,
evolution of the matter produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions have
emerged as crucial descriptors of the rapid hydrodynamization of quark-gluon
plasma (QGP). Adiabatic Hydrodynamization (AH) has been proposed as a framework
with which to describe, explain, and predict attractor behavior that draws upon
an analogy to the adiabatic approximation in quantum mechanics. In this work,
we systematize the description of pre-hydrodynamic attractors in kinetic theory
by showing how to use the AH framework to identify these long-lived solutions
to which varied initial conditions rapidly evolve, demonstrating the robustness
of this framework. In a simplified QCD kinetic theory in the small-angle
scattering limit, we use AH to explain both the early- and late-time scaling
behavior of a longitudinally expanding gluon gas in a unified framework. In
this context, we show that AH provides a unified description of, and intuition
for, all the stages of what in QCD would be bottom-up thermalization, starting
from a pre-hydrodynamic attractor and ending with hydrodynamization. We
additionally discuss the connection between the notions of scaling behavior and
adiabaticity and the crucial role of time-dependent coordinate redefinitions in
identifying the degrees of freedom of kinetic theories that give rise to
attractor solutions. The tools we present open a path to the intuitive
explanation of how attractor behavior arises and how the attractor evolves in
all stages of the hydrodynamization of QGP in heavy ion collisions.
