When do AUs work? When should you just leave well enough alone?
I had a thought today, while I was tearing shelving apart.
I started poking my nose back into Marvel Comics fandom this week, after an extended absence, and basically started with porn, as you do.
I'm not sure I'll ever be comfortable enough with comic canon (with the possible exception of something like Ultimates, where the canon is much, much shorter) to write “real” fic with a plot. I am, frankly, terrified of comics fen and of getting it wrong, and I'm reasonably content to crank out porn or gen ficlets for prompts and save my plot ideas for canons that I feel more comfortable with.
However, I had this thought, and I don't have time to go googling around. Does anyone write/has anyone ever written truly AU comic-fandom fic? I haven't been able to think of any, but I am not widely-read. I also still haven't read any of the holiday-exchange fic, so please feel free to point out recent things that I may have missed in addition to older stuff that I don't know about.
To be clear, I'm not talking about moving characters about in universes, or writing fixits or whatever. I'm talking about fic where they are not superheroes at all, never have been. Where Logan is a plumber or Remy owns a bar (or just grew up an average thief) or Peter stayed spider-free or Tony was born into a less-affluent lifestyle and is maybe a mechanical engineer or a professor or something. (or DC characters, or whatever publisher you prefer. You get the point.)
A while ago, [Bad username: ”kate”] asked me something about AUs, with respect to Die Hard and my general thought was that it's easy to make real-world AUs of Sci-Fi/Fantasy settings (Stargate, Star Trek, Harry Potter, etc.) where you take the essentials of the characters and move them into a familiar setting. I see a lot of prompts for high school/college/office AUs for things that are set elsewhere.
I have no numbers to back this up, but it seems like the larger portion of long RPF is AU as well. I'm sure that's because setting up some sort of universe lends itself to longer fic, on top of the squick reasons why AUs may be more popular. I also think that unless you're just going to write ship/smut fic, you can only write so many stories about people in bands/pundits/actors before you're telling the same story over and over again.
Comic fandoms already have a low-barrier-to-entry version in the movieverses, and for the exceedingly creative types, there basically aren't any limits on what could be a believable plot. You can drop the existing characters down in basically any situation without needing to set up a universe where they are space pirates or whatever.
Basically, I don't see any reason why one would need to write an AU, and I can easily imagine some problems with writing one (which may or may not also be reasons why the stories would be unpopular). Being/becoming a superhero is a transformative experience. Are there characters that you think just wouldn't work anymore without their superness?
I started poking my nose back into Marvel Comics fandom this week, after an extended absence, and basically started with porn, as you do.
I'm not sure I'll ever be comfortable enough with comic canon (with the possible exception of something like Ultimates, where the canon is much, much shorter) to write “real” fic with a plot. I am, frankly, terrified of comics fen and of getting it wrong, and I'm reasonably content to crank out porn or gen ficlets for prompts and save my plot ideas for canons that I feel more comfortable with.
However, I had this thought, and I don't have time to go googling around. Does anyone write/has anyone ever written truly AU comic-fandom fic? I haven't been able to think of any, but I am not widely-read. I also still haven't read any of the holiday-exchange fic, so please feel free to point out recent things that I may have missed in addition to older stuff that I don't know about.
To be clear, I'm not talking about moving characters about in universes, or writing fixits or whatever. I'm talking about fic where they are not superheroes at all, never have been. Where Logan is a plumber or Remy owns a bar (or just grew up an average thief) or Peter stayed spider-free or Tony was born into a less-affluent lifestyle and is maybe a mechanical engineer or a professor or something. (or DC characters, or whatever publisher you prefer. You get the point.)
A while ago, [Bad username: ”kate”] asked me something about AUs, with respect to Die Hard and my general thought was that it's easy to make real-world AUs of Sci-Fi/Fantasy settings (Stargate, Star Trek, Harry Potter, etc.) where you take the essentials of the characters and move them into a familiar setting. I see a lot of prompts for high school/college/office AUs for things that are set elsewhere.
I have no numbers to back this up, but it seems like the larger portion of long RPF is AU as well. I'm sure that's because setting up some sort of universe lends itself to longer fic, on top of the squick reasons why AUs may be more popular. I also think that unless you're just going to write ship/smut fic, you can only write so many stories about people in bands/pundits/actors before you're telling the same story over and over again.
Comic fandoms already have a low-barrier-to-entry version in the movieverses, and for the exceedingly creative types, there basically aren't any limits on what could be a believable plot. You can drop the existing characters down in basically any situation without needing to set up a universe where they are space pirates or whatever.
Basically, I don't see any reason why one would need to write an AU, and I can easily imagine some problems with writing one (which may or may not also be reasons why the stories would be unpopular). Being/becoming a superhero is a transformative experience. Are there characters that you think just wouldn't work anymore without their superness?