Snowflake #3: AUs

[spatz]

Challenge #3: In your own space, put some favorite characters into an AU, fuse some favorite canons together, talk about your favorite AU/fusion tropes, or tell us why AU/fusions aren’t your cup of tea.

I DO love AUs! A quick spot-check showed that they're...about 20% of my bookmarks, damn, and 18% of my published fic (...let's not talk about the WIPs). My favorites are canon-divergence AUs: I love the puzzle of how one small change (or a large one) can alter events, both as a reader and a writer, the question of what parts of a character are essential and what shift with circumstance. Plus, fix-its! I'm not great with tragedy.

Setting AUs are dicier - I'm a sucker for competence, so a lot of my fandom are full of highly capable/dangerous/competent/talented people. So while I do actually read a fair number of coffeeshop/mundane life/university AUs for the mindless fluff, they rarely move me as strongly as fics where my characters get to keep that aspect of themselves. Like, a Leverage AU where they're all baristas is never gonna compete with 'international Robin Hood team of cons and thieves', you know?

Fusions are trickier ground. For one thing, the language around them has gotten increasingly confused. Like, an Anastasia AU (♥) is technically a fusion but no one calls them that anymore. Most people just call something an AU whether it's a fusion or not, and fusions can be combined with more direct crossovers as well as technically being a type of crossover, and. yeah. It's messy, and I've fallen into calling everything an AU unless I'm figuring out how to tag things on Pinboard just because that's the standard language now.

Both fusions and canon-divergences have the same fail point for me: sticking too close to canon events. If I wanted a flat retread of that story, I'd just re-visit canon. I ended up picking this icon because one of the places the Temeraire series really falls down is sticking so closely to the actual path of the Napoleonic Wars - and conversely, is strongest when it diverges and has France invade Britain. I can definitely understand not wanting to reconstruct a decades-long war as an author, and Novik certainly did a lot more on the social side of changes, but it was frustrating. Dragons would change things!!! It's a hard trap to avoid when writing in fandom as well, because our urge is to keep the scenes and moments we love, or that are formative to our characters, but the whole point of an AU is to see how things went differently as well. Finding the right balance can be very difficult, but I definitely prefer the end of the spectrum that takes the original premise and runs away with it.