“What if everybody was completely totally different in a completely totally different world?”
I saw Quirky’s frustration at fanficrants and decided to poke my nose up since this is also something that drives me nuts. Before I start, I feel it only fair to warn the many excellent writers of AUs on my friendslist that this is a very personal rant. And should not be taken as condemnation, because I have nothing but respect for writers who can pull off extreme AUs, since, in my mind, it is the hardest form of fanfic to pull off well. It’s the ones that don’t that prompt the following….
I have no idea how people want to define Alternate Reality versus Alternate Universe. Frankly I don’t really care as long as I can split whatever you want to call these stories into my two mental categories.
Category One is the type of fanfic that got me into fanfic in the first place, and is still the type I like more than any other. Category One is, for lack of a better definition, a very specific what if. That is, you take canon, you take the canon characters and their background, and you tweak one or a few things and go to town. What if Giles had been Buffy’s first watcher? What if Elizabeth’s mother and sisters hadn’t behaved badly around Darcy? What if Eowyn and Eomer had been part of that initial delegation to Rivendell and one of them had been chosen for the Fellowship rather than or along with Boromir? What if Kagome had fallen down the well when she was a little older, a little more self-confident and a little more experienced? And yes, these are all plot bunnies I’m currently trying to kill. These stories take canon to a certain point and then spin off from there. I call them ‘timeline branches’ but whatever you choose to call them, they use the background and principles of the canon universe to a certain point in time to take the story in a different direction.
Category Two is the type of fanfic that leaves me deeply torn- more than nearly any other type of story. These are also what ifs, but wide range, broad scope what ifs. In these stories, the canon universe is generally gone, the characters’ backgrounds are very different and the commonalities that hold them to being fanfic are either a) the characterizations being consistent with the fandom universe and/or b) the storyline following, as best it can, the storyline of the original universe, just under very very different circumstances. As an illustration, one of my favourite Austen ficcers is Belen who wrote this amazing modern day AU where Darcy was a champion show jumper, Elizabeth his stable hand and Wickham a gay horse trainer. It was fantastic. It followed the original plot line well, with such in-character variations that I was overwhelmed. And it was, without a doubt, even changing the characters’ names, a version of Pride and Prejudice. In my mind, to pull off something like that is pretty much the hardest thing to do in fanfic and I salute her for it.
But if you’re going to write an all human HighSchool!Buffy, Inuyasha as the space captain who falls in love with the moon princess or a Harry Potter AU where Hermione’s a mortician and Draco’s a woodworker (Yes-I’ve seen this. No- I’m not including a link) you have to have *hella* good characterization and/or follow the series plot really closely for it to work. And what I mean by “work” is for the story to have any need to call itself fanfiction whatsoever other than the names of the characters. To be blunt- if you’re not using the characters/characterizations in any sense from the show and you’re not borrowing the series plot, backstory or universe- why are you calling your story fanfiction?
While I let that thought sit, I’m going to take a deep breath and move to the next part. Which is possibly even worse. And partly, I think, an explanation for many of a certain type of AU.
I really, really hate to write this next part because it’s hypocritical as all hell, but I honestly think it needs to be said. I am one of those strange girls who actually had never read a Harlequin before going to university. Then we did “Harlequin Masterpiece Theater” where we read all the sex scenes out loud and had to do nasty things if we were the first person who burst out laughing and…. Well actually, I haven’t read any of them since. It’s not even that they’re bad stories- it’s just that my tastes are a little more to the angst and dork/geek end of the spectrum than straight up fluff. Or flowers of womanliness. So when I was talking to one of my best real life friends about fanfic, her little revelation came as a genuine surprise.
For kicks, I was reading her the summaries of one of my fandoms, 90% of them very different AUs. To my surprise, she could name which books most of the plots came from- especially if I actually opened the story and read her a little bit more. And I don’t mean that they were plagiarizing perse- more that a lot of them were using a combination of the major plots common to various Harlequin series and something called Sweet Valley High, whose description I’m still trying to erase from my brain. And there’s nothing really wrong with this- all it really means is that we like romance, we like the fluff and we don’t particularly mind if we disguise the fluff by changing Kate and John to Kagome and Inuyasha. But my problem is, if I wanted to read about Kate and John, I’d go buy a story featuring Kate and John. Sure you can shoehorn Inuyasha into the rebel bad boy and Kagome into the naïve good girl roles, but they lose a lot of what makes them interesting to me as characters if you only use those single dimensions.
For myself, I read fanfiction to see different takes on the characters I know and love from the universe I know and love. While I’ve read some excellent totally different AUs (and yes, mortician Hermione was pretty damn good), most aren’t really fanfic in my mind but thinly disguised origfic. And I know I’m the girl who twists canon and characerization to hell in my own stories- that’s where the hypocrisy comes in :)
So what am I trying to say here?
It doesn’t really matter what you call the story. A good story will be a good story, regardless of the universe or names of the characters. But let’s be honest folks. There’s a big difference between a timeline spinoff and a Harlequin with ‘Inuyasha’ and ‘Kagome’ replacing ‘John’ and ‘Kate’. I don’t care whether you call it AU or AR or “Totally Different World with Inuyasha Character Names”, but if you’re writing origfic it’ll get a lot farther if you take out the fanfic crutch and call Kate and John by their own names. And maybe then they can develop as Kate and John without the ghost of Kagome and Inuyasha hanging over top of them. And who knows- maybe they’ll have their own fandom one day and someone will write an alternate universe feudal fairytale? I’ll be first in line with the popcorn, I promise :) Hmmm…. So what if Kate never met John?
I have no idea how people want to define Alternate Reality versus Alternate Universe. Frankly I don’t really care as long as I can split whatever you want to call these stories into my two mental categories.
Category One is the type of fanfic that got me into fanfic in the first place, and is still the type I like more than any other. Category One is, for lack of a better definition, a very specific what if. That is, you take canon, you take the canon characters and their background, and you tweak one or a few things and go to town. What if Giles had been Buffy’s first watcher? What if Elizabeth’s mother and sisters hadn’t behaved badly around Darcy? What if Eowyn and Eomer had been part of that initial delegation to Rivendell and one of them had been chosen for the Fellowship rather than or along with Boromir? What if Kagome had fallen down the well when she was a little older, a little more self-confident and a little more experienced? And yes, these are all plot bunnies I’m currently trying to kill. These stories take canon to a certain point and then spin off from there. I call them ‘timeline branches’ but whatever you choose to call them, they use the background and principles of the canon universe to a certain point in time to take the story in a different direction.
Category Two is the type of fanfic that leaves me deeply torn- more than nearly any other type of story. These are also what ifs, but wide range, broad scope what ifs. In these stories, the canon universe is generally gone, the characters’ backgrounds are very different and the commonalities that hold them to being fanfic are either a) the characterizations being consistent with the fandom universe and/or b) the storyline following, as best it can, the storyline of the original universe, just under very very different circumstances. As an illustration, one of my favourite Austen ficcers is Belen who wrote this amazing modern day AU where Darcy was a champion show jumper, Elizabeth his stable hand and Wickham a gay horse trainer. It was fantastic. It followed the original plot line well, with such in-character variations that I was overwhelmed. And it was, without a doubt, even changing the characters’ names, a version of Pride and Prejudice. In my mind, to pull off something like that is pretty much the hardest thing to do in fanfic and I salute her for it.
But if you’re going to write an all human HighSchool!Buffy, Inuyasha as the space captain who falls in love with the moon princess or a Harry Potter AU where Hermione’s a mortician and Draco’s a woodworker (Yes-I’ve seen this. No- I’m not including a link) you have to have *hella* good characterization and/or follow the series plot really closely for it to work. And what I mean by “work” is for the story to have any need to call itself fanfiction whatsoever other than the names of the characters. To be blunt- if you’re not using the characters/characterizations in any sense from the show and you’re not borrowing the series plot, backstory or universe- why are you calling your story fanfiction?
While I let that thought sit, I’m going to take a deep breath and move to the next part. Which is possibly even worse. And partly, I think, an explanation for many of a certain type of AU.
I really, really hate to write this next part because it’s hypocritical as all hell, but I honestly think it needs to be said. I am one of those strange girls who actually had never read a Harlequin before going to university. Then we did “Harlequin Masterpiece Theater” where we read all the sex scenes out loud and had to do nasty things if we were the first person who burst out laughing and…. Well actually, I haven’t read any of them since. It’s not even that they’re bad stories- it’s just that my tastes are a little more to the angst and dork/geek end of the spectrum than straight up fluff. Or flowers of womanliness. So when I was talking to one of my best real life friends about fanfic, her little revelation came as a genuine surprise.
For kicks, I was reading her the summaries of one of my fandoms, 90% of them very different AUs. To my surprise, she could name which books most of the plots came from- especially if I actually opened the story and read her a little bit more. And I don’t mean that they were plagiarizing perse- more that a lot of them were using a combination of the major plots common to various Harlequin series and something called Sweet Valley High, whose description I’m still trying to erase from my brain. And there’s nothing really wrong with this- all it really means is that we like romance, we like the fluff and we don’t particularly mind if we disguise the fluff by changing Kate and John to Kagome and Inuyasha. But my problem is, if I wanted to read about Kate and John, I’d go buy a story featuring Kate and John. Sure you can shoehorn Inuyasha into the rebel bad boy and Kagome into the naïve good girl roles, but they lose a lot of what makes them interesting to me as characters if you only use those single dimensions.
For myself, I read fanfiction to see different takes on the characters I know and love from the universe I know and love. While I’ve read some excellent totally different AUs (and yes, mortician Hermione was pretty damn good), most aren’t really fanfic in my mind but thinly disguised origfic. And I know I’m the girl who twists canon and characerization to hell in my own stories- that’s where the hypocrisy comes in :)
So what am I trying to say here?
It doesn’t really matter what you call the story. A good story will be a good story, regardless of the universe or names of the characters. But let’s be honest folks. There’s a big difference between a timeline spinoff and a Harlequin with ‘Inuyasha’ and ‘Kagome’ replacing ‘John’ and ‘Kate’. I don’t care whether you call it AU or AR or “Totally Different World with Inuyasha Character Names”, but if you’re writing origfic it’ll get a lot farther if you take out the fanfic crutch and call Kate and John by their own names. And maybe then they can develop as Kate and John without the ghost of Kagome and Inuyasha hanging over top of them. And who knows- maybe they’ll have their own fandom one day and someone will write an alternate universe feudal fairytale? I’ll be first in line with the popcorn, I promise :) Hmmm…. So what if Kate never met John?