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brightknightie) wrote2022-01-08 02:16 pm
brightknightie) wrote2022-01-08 02:16 pm
Entry tags:
'22 Snowflake Challenge #3: AUs
> "talk about your favorite AU/fusion tropes, or tell us why AU/fusions aren’t your cup of tea"
I personally tend to think of fusions as in the crossover family, rather than the AU family. So this prompt asked me vocabulary and taxonomy as well as genre questions. On consideration, I see how fusions are often as closely related to AUs as they are to crossovers -- a kind of convergent evolution, perhaps!
For myself, I had long thought of Alternate Universe as the overarching top-level category that includes all the kinds of contradictions to and divergences from canon. This would have every degree of branched, parallel, and "total" (coffee shop and so on). Basically, I had thought of anything that didn't intend to fit into, follow from, or cap off canon as it existed at the time of the story as an AU.
From the replies I've seen to this meme prompt, it sounds like the more current understanding of "AU" has largely shed the most modest tier of canon tinkering, and now more usually means the broadest tier: the "total" AUs. Is that about right?
For many (many!) years, I would have said that I don't enjoy AUs.
Or, rather, that I enjoy only those AUs that are specifically "What if?"s from within canon. Those grounded "What if?" divergences appeal easily to me; I know where they fit and how to enter them, and feel that my investment in the canon characters and circumstances should continue to pay off throughout the divergence.
I particularly love long-hiatus FK fanfic, which at the time was of course following on from canon, but such stories that are new today are necessarily an AU divergence between seasons one and two, denying, avoiding, or discounting the canon of seasons two and three. (As you know, more than a year passed in the real world between FK's seasons one and two, and then many things changed with "Killer Instinct." And I just like first season better for myself. There was such hope and strength in first season.)
I enjoyed OUaT AUs that included Mulan with the rest of the Storybrook characters from the very beginning, on her own merits, if unseen by the cameras, and didn't wait for canon to loop her in seasons down the road as an auxiliary to Aurora and Philip. I especially embraced the construction that this unseen-but-obviously-there Storybrook!Mulan was a US veteran.
I have become increasingly fond of a wider range of "What if?" constructions over the years. I just still do like best when I can spot the point of divergence in some way.
"Total" AUs seem very rare in my own most-beloved fandoms. They just don't seem to come up very often. Maybe I would like them if I met them! Yes for myself, who is not an expert in AUs, it's challenging to imagine characters who are so defined by their unusual circumstances into significantly different circumstances, and yet remain the same people. A Nick who is not a vampire who wants to be human? A Duncan who does not have to hold on to his humanity through the alienation of immortality? It would be, effectively, removing the multifaceted fantasy metaphors and grounding the character in a single interpretation of that metaphor, which could be fine... but could also be up for accusations of oversimplification? Tricky.
The people of BSG78 could be made survivors of just about any historical atrocity, but by removing the sci-fi fiction buffer, would it not risk becoming trivializing of the real tragedies? Perhaps a fictional tragedy, just a different one, would work for BSG78, like a high-school AU but after a shooting, or a coffee shop AU but after a riot. Um. Yeah, my dearest fandoms are often grim under the surface, I know. :-) I suppose BSG78 could always become overtly the Wagon Train AU it has covertly been all along. Yes, it fuses into mythical Old West territory smoothly, come to think of it, as long as we leave the inciting incident unspoken.
D&DC... would require an alternate group bonding experience. Kidnapped by aliens? Drafted into a military?
That said, in other people's fandoms, now! I went through a period of reading actually quite a lot of Stargate: Atlantis total AUs. I enjoyed them very much! I even helped beta a couple, gracious. But I'd seen only a handful of canon episodes and had no investment in the intricacies of canon, so I didn't really know what I was reading, as such, except vivid characters with lots of expressive snark. I could have nearly been reading original fic, for all I knew about any underlying commentary on the genuine IP canon.
(Stargate and X-Files are my best friend's dearest fandoms. I know them mainly by osmosis.)
What do you think? Do "total" AUs go with my dearest fandoms better than I yet realize?
I personally tend to think of fusions as in the crossover family, rather than the AU family. So this prompt asked me vocabulary and taxonomy as well as genre questions. On consideration, I see how fusions are often as closely related to AUs as they are to crossovers -- a kind of convergent evolution, perhaps!
For myself, I had long thought of Alternate Universe as the overarching top-level category that includes all the kinds of contradictions to and divergences from canon. This would have every degree of branched, parallel, and "total" (coffee shop and so on). Basically, I had thought of anything that didn't intend to fit into, follow from, or cap off canon as it existed at the time of the story as an AU.
From the replies I've seen to this meme prompt, it sounds like the more current understanding of "AU" has largely shed the most modest tier of canon tinkering, and now more usually means the broadest tier: the "total" AUs. Is that about right?
For many (many!) years, I would have said that I don't enjoy AUs.
Or, rather, that I enjoy only those AUs that are specifically "What if?"s from within canon. Those grounded "What if?" divergences appeal easily to me; I know where they fit and how to enter them, and feel that my investment in the canon characters and circumstances should continue to pay off throughout the divergence.
I particularly love long-hiatus FK fanfic, which at the time was of course following on from canon, but such stories that are new today are necessarily an AU divergence between seasons one and two, denying, avoiding, or discounting the canon of seasons two and three. (As you know, more than a year passed in the real world between FK's seasons one and two, and then many things changed with "Killer Instinct." And I just like first season better for myself. There was such hope and strength in first season.)
I enjoyed OUaT AUs that included Mulan with the rest of the Storybrook characters from the very beginning, on her own merits, if unseen by the cameras, and didn't wait for canon to loop her in seasons down the road as an auxiliary to Aurora and Philip. I especially embraced the construction that this unseen-but-obviously-there Storybrook!Mulan was a US veteran.
I have become increasingly fond of a wider range of "What if?" constructions over the years. I just still do like best when I can spot the point of divergence in some way.
"Total" AUs seem very rare in my own most-beloved fandoms. They just don't seem to come up very often. Maybe I would like them if I met them! Yes for myself, who is not an expert in AUs, it's challenging to imagine characters who are so defined by their unusual circumstances into significantly different circumstances, and yet remain the same people. A Nick who is not a vampire who wants to be human? A Duncan who does not have to hold on to his humanity through the alienation of immortality? It would be, effectively, removing the multifaceted fantasy metaphors and grounding the character in a single interpretation of that metaphor, which could be fine... but could also be up for accusations of oversimplification? Tricky.
The people of BSG78 could be made survivors of just about any historical atrocity, but by removing the sci-fi fiction buffer, would it not risk becoming trivializing of the real tragedies? Perhaps a fictional tragedy, just a different one, would work for BSG78, like a high-school AU but after a shooting, or a coffee shop AU but after a riot. Um. Yeah, my dearest fandoms are often grim under the surface, I know. :-) I suppose BSG78 could always become overtly the Wagon Train AU it has covertly been all along. Yes, it fuses into mythical Old West territory smoothly, come to think of it, as long as we leave the inciting incident unspoken.
D&DC... would require an alternate group bonding experience. Kidnapped by aliens? Drafted into a military?
That said, in other people's fandoms, now! I went through a period of reading actually quite a lot of Stargate: Atlantis total AUs. I enjoyed them very much! I even helped beta a couple, gracious. But I'd seen only a handful of canon episodes and had no investment in the intricacies of canon, so I didn't really know what I was reading, as such, except vivid characters with lots of expressive snark. I could have nearly been reading original fic, for all I knew about any underlying commentary on the genuine IP canon.
(Stargate and X-Files are my best friend's dearest fandoms. I know them mainly by osmosis.)
What do you think? Do "total" AUs go with my dearest fandoms better than I yet realize?
no subject
The Star Trek Mirror Universe is an interesting example here, because the parallel universe is part of the canon, and is definitely a concept across a lot of science fiction.