sholio | December meme: AUs/Alternate Universes

frith_in_thorns asked for all my thoughts on AUs. :)

AUs: I think they're great! But I didn't always think so. When I first got into writing fanfic, I wasn't really interested in them at all. Looking back on it now, I think this was partly because I used to move through fandoms very quickly compared to now (so I'd move on before I started wanting variations on the source canon), and partly because a lot of canons simply don't make me crave AUs, just like a lot of canons don't make me want fanfic.

(The only exception is that I'd write both AUs and fusions for my original stuff -- the characters in the Wild West, the characters transported to Video Game X, etc -- although I didn't realize at the time that there was a name for it; I used to call it the Apocrypha.)

Anyway, I first started getting into AUs in Stargate fandom. That was a very AU-heavy fandom, and I read a lot of them and started to realize how many different things you could do with different settings and ideas. I'm not really into cracky AUs so much, because for me, the worldbuilding is a big part of the appeal of an AU -- as a writer and a reader. Which is not to say I haven't enjoyed (and written!) some truly bizarre AUs ... but generally, just as I prefer realistic fiction to zany comedy, I prefer realistic AUs that take a serious look at the differences from canon.

And that's the thing I love most about AUs, I guess -- the ability to put the characters through their paces under radically different circumstances: scifi/fantasy AUs for canons that don't have magic or spaceships; real-world AUs for characters from SFF canons; "turn left" type AUs that take a particular event from canon and send things spinning off in a different direction. I think that for me, AUs straddle an interesting middle ground between original fiction and fanfic, because they come with the built-in fannish attachment to the characters, but they include the ability to build a whole world from the ground up or to do a character-growth arc that wouldn't really be possible in a strictly canon-compliant fic.

For me (and I know mileage varies on this), the fandoms that work best as AU fandoms are the ones in which the characters detach from their canon easily. For example, I'm not that into AUs in Avatar: The Last Airbender, especially not total AUs (i.e. ones in which the characters are baristas or space pirates or a rock band), because the characters are so intrinsically rooted in their particular world and storyline. White Collar, on the other hand ... the world is pretty generic, it's the characters who are distinctive, and putting them into an urban fantasy AU or a fusion with a Victorian-horror video game is ridiculously fun; it's sort of like running a one-player RPG, in a way.

I know that AUs aren't everyone's cup of tea and that's fine -- they didn't used to be mine, and I still only enjoy AUs for a few fandoms, so I understand it completely! But personally, I think they're a lot of fun to play with. To use a probably ridiculous metaphor, it's like canon is a line, and fanfic is a two-dimensional graph around that line (lots of possibilities going off in all directions, but still within the same plane as canon) and then AUs add a brand-new axis going off from canon at 90 degrees.

For the record, I also really enjoy canon AUs, as in Fringe or Once Upon a Time or any number of time travel stories I could name. Of course, those tend to play with identity in a way that fanfic AUs usually don't (though some fanfic does; I've written some fics in which comparing the AU versions to "our" versions is the point). In fanfic, I think the comparison is implicit, usually; we can't help comparing the originals to the AU versions when we read, enjoying the pleasant tension between our mental idea of how the character is supposed to be, and the different direction that an AU takes them. It's an enjoyable reversal of expectations, a happy little stroke to the narrative pleasure centers of the brain if we "know" that one thing is true and then get a little bit of a surprise. And I think that's one of the reasons why we do it -- it's why the AU is about the canon characters and not about original characters. But in original fiction, the comparison needs to be made explicit, and usually the concept is not introduced if the identity issue isn't going to be played with a little.