Promethia and I were talking about AUs the other day. I shall copy & paste what she wrote:
"I think AUs (by which I mean full AUs, not the-same-world-as-the-source-work-but-with-one-crucial-thing-changed AUs) are fic for fic's sake? Like, if you are reading an AU, you are there to wallow in the fic tropes of it all--for better and for worse. The characters, let's be honest, are only going to bear a passing resemblance to those in the source material. It's not literally 'the grumpy one and the sunshine one' . . . but they'll be a lot closer to that level of abstraction than to original characters. Which means most of the exploration-of-the-source-materal aspects that you get in regular fic are lost in favor of just being allowed to wallow."
no subject
"I think AUs (by which I mean full AUs, not the-same-world-as-the-source-work-but-with-one-crucial-thing-changed AUs) are fic for fic's sake? Like, if you are reading an AU, you are there to wallow in the fic tropes of it all--for better and for worse. The characters, let's be honest, are only going to bear a passing resemblance to those in the source material. It's not literally 'the grumpy one and the sunshine one' . . . but they'll be a lot closer to that level of abstraction than to original characters. Which means most of the exploration-of-the-source-materal aspects that you get in regular fic are lost in favor of just being allowed to wallow."