And bring it all right back to you

[dolorosa_12]

I am aware I have a lot of comments to catch up with, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. Suffice it to say that if you have written a comment, I am aware of it and know I need to respond.

It's Day Sixteen of the fandom meme:

P: Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas).

This prompt really doesn't play to my strengths. The only kind of AU I've ever read or written are canon-divergence AUs in the vein of 'this character didn't die, what happened next?'

So instead I'm going to throw this prompt back to you all: those of you who enjoy AUs (either reading or writing them), what are your favourite AU scenarios? And why do you like those scenarios in particular?


Q: A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.

R: Which friendship/platonic relationship is your favorite in fandom?

S: Show us an example of your personal headcanon.

T: Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?

U: Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.

V: Which character do you relate to most?

W: A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.

X: A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.

Y: What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?

Z: Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!

montfelisky asked me to write about bullet journalling, and I finally managed to get around to doing so. The post is over at dolorosa12, my longform blogging site, and you can read it here. As always with posts over on Wordpress, please feel free to comment either here or there.

Comments

[naye]

My favorite AU scenarios are, uh, 'this character didn't die, what happened next?'. XD

Though once I co-wrote almost 90k of an urban fantasy Stargate: Atlantis AU that was still set in space only it had fae and magic and telepathic whales. The worldbuilding was very much a joint exercise though - I'm not naturally talented in the coming up with wild ideas department. (See also: lack of crack ideas.)

[dolorosa_12]

Fae and magic and telepathic whales sounds amazing!

Yeah, my strength doesn't lie in the wild ideas department either — generally I get into a particular fandom because the characters and the setting appeals to me, and I'm more interested in exploring those relationships within that setting.

[luzula]

Like you, I mostly prefer canon divergence AU:s! But I've definitely written and enjoyed AU:s with a changed setting, too. I like it when you introduce some new worldbuilding element that can interact in interesting ways with the characters. For example, I remember in due South, someone said my AU where Benton Fraser was a werewolf made more sense than canon, which was quite a compliment! : )

I don't like changed-setting AU:s which undermine or remove the things about the characters which make them themselves or which make their interactions too different, if that makes sense. For example, if you take characters from a war setting and put them in a coffee shop, that is not likely to work for me.

[dolorosa_12]

I don't like changed-setting AU:s which undermine or remove the things about the characters which make them themselves or which make their interactions too different

That definitely makes sense and I agree entirely. I've never been into coffee shop AUs for that reason — so much of why characters are the way they are is due to the setting they're in, and if you change that setting it's sometimes hard to see why those characters would interact in the same way. I'm not a fan of highschool or university AUs for that reason, or mundane AUs for fandoms which take place in a fantasy/scifi setting.

[nyctanthes]

I enjoy writing canon divergent AUs of the "X didn't die" or "lets focus on a couple of characters out of the large cast" variety. I like playing out long game "what-ifs" that stretch out over a number of years, and that immediately or eventually take the characters out of their physical environment. So...near future canon divergent AUs with bonus road trips. Some of these *also* have crossovers that only a handful of people will understand (Umbrella Academy with Lincoln in the Bardo, Umbrella Academy with The Library at Mt. Char!)

Now that I'm answering you, I realize that I really, really like canon-divergent AUs. :P

In terms of reading, I'll read these or a well-done mundane/different setting fic (and if I'm really in love with the canon, let's face it, it doesn't have to be of stellar quality. It just can't drag down other characters to prop a ship.) We're talking pirates or magic high school or daemons. (A particular favorite: zombie apocalypse.)

My one pre-req is that it have a plot beyond "and they fall in love." So that tends to rule out coffee shop AUs.

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, I love canon divergence AUs for precisely that reason — exploring all those 'what if' scenarios that might play out if a single detail from canon is changed.

I can't do mundane/fusion AUs — as a His Dark Materials fan, dæmon AUs in particular really don't work for me — because generally my interest in a fandom is those particular characters, in their specific setting. But I know those kinds of AUs are really popular, and that I'm a little odd in this regard.

[corvidology]

I too am only a fan of the canon divergent type AU.

I don't just get drawn into fandoms by an OTP but by the canon as well, so if a writer goes full-on AU - these space bounty hunters are now baristas - I'm not the reader they're looking for.

[dolorosa_12]

I think that explains things really well — and your way of getting into fandom is similar to my own. I'm not just in it for the OTP, but for how those characters interact with their setting, so changing the setting is not going to do it for me.

[schneefink]

Canon-divergent AUs are my favorites too :) And I think time travel is related to that?, because it's often basically canon-divergence "what if they had additional information (and sometimes powers etc.)"
I also really like "add a sprinkle of magic" AUs, e.g. everything is the same but one character has magic/is a werewolf/lives with a ghost etc.
Mundane coffee shop AUs are in general my least favorite, but even they can be very good in the hands of a good writer.

[dolorosa_12]

Oooh, time travel AUs can be great, in the hands of a good writer. (I mean, all kinds of fic is good in the hands of a good writer, it's whether I feel in the mood to read what they're writing.)

It sounds as if you're pretty omnivorous when it comes to the kinds of AUs you'll read.

[meteordust]

I'm a sucker for canon divergence AUs of the fix-it type, including "this character didn't die tragically in the backstory and everyone had happier lives". I'm also fond of "the good guys befriend the villain and win him over with kindness".

I have read some coffee shop AUs that did some really neat adaptations of canon, so I always like when I stumble across a good one.

[dolorosa_12]

I love both of your types of canon divergence AUs, especially the second one. I also love AUs where the villain and the good guys have to awkwardly work together against some greater evil, and they grudgingly come to appreciate each other.

[lokifan]

^^^ This.

[morbane]

I adore canon-divergence AUs. Contrarily, I'm extremely picky about time-travel AUs; the set-piece where a character figures out how to time travel and what they need to fix and how often bores me, and I am also often bored by the necessary re-treading and examining of canon events.


I'm often delighted by setting-change AUs, or fusions where characters from one fandom were "always" established in another setting, and I'm trying to think what I like most about it.

-Sometimes there's the comfortable sorting aspect of it. "Who would be a water-bender, who would be a Green-Jewelled Queen, who would be Nirai or Andan, who would be one of Thanos' children?" And what's especially nice about that is that plot and conflict flow easily from those determinations and exceptions.

-Sometimes it's that a particular setting has specific kinds of plots and conflicts as a feature, and I want to see how characters from world A would deal with an entirely different sort of conflict than they normally would.

-Sometimes it's that two different settings involve characters dealing with conflicts and development that have a lot of thematic similarity, and I want to examine that thematic similarity. For example, this is basically crack, but I once wanted a Rogue One (Star Wars) and The Goblin Emperor fusion. No, hear me out: Rogue One has characters Baz and Chirrut, who are religious adherents whose temple has fallen and whose home is occupied; I wanted to imagine them as a pair of nohecharei (elite bodyguards of the Emperor, in TGE's Ethuveraz empire) whose empire has been overthrown and who are all that is left of the court, because it spoke to me to use the Ethuveraz setting to contextualize their immense cultural loss.

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you for taking the time to explain! I can certainly understand why you (and so many others) find the various kinds of AUs fun, intriguing, almost like an intellectual exercise. The setting-change AUs that require assigning characters to Hogwarts houses, dæmons, bending types, and so on are almost like an extension of the various quizzes and communities where people can Sort themselves, find out what their dæmon would be, etc, and given that fandom is all about thinking intensely about characters, putting them in those kinds of AUs makes sense.

Time travel (whether in fic or original fiction) has to be extremely good for it to work for me, so I agree with you there.

That crossover between Rogue One and the Goblin Emperor could definitely work!