![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Fannish Friday: degrees of AU-ish-ness
This is probably going to be only relevant to those of us who tend to love genre fandoms of the speculative fiction or historical variety, but I want to talk about mundane AU fanfiction--where you take a historical, fantasy, or scifi fandom and plop the characters down in a contemporary setting. You know--the superheroes are now all working at a coffee shop or the royal court is now a high school, that kind of thing.
I am just curious about how people feel about them and what you feel their relationship to canon is.
When I first get into a fandom, I have ZERO interest in reading these kinds of stories. I am there for the fic that explores the world of the text--missing scenes, post-canon, fix-it fics, and especially canon divergence. I will pass mundane AUs by.
Once I've been in the fandom for a long time and read a lot of fic, I sometimes can enjoy mundane AUs. This happened to me with Infinite (where a mundane AU is literally anything where they're not idols) and with The Untamed fandoms. I read quite a bit of Untamed mundane AUs to this day.
And yet...I don't really feel like they're fanfic in the same way that more canon-observant fics are. There are some that do a marvelous job of adapting all the beats of canon--the character dynamics, the plot points--to a different setting. Those are rare and masterful, and I'm impressed by them. But the rest are just...the characters being written about have the character's faces and some of their personality traits, but that's about it.
Obviously, this is all a spectrum. But there are some that venture so far from canon that I feel like I'm reading an original work of fiction. And I can enjoy some of those, even love them, but I don't love them as fanfiction, I love them as original fiction.
It's interesting to think about how far it has to diverge from canon to not be fanfiction to me. I was reading a Wangxian fic this week that had the same kind of mundane AU plot I'd read before, but this one immediately went to the "this is not fanfiction" realm for me because Wei Wuxian was a lot older than Lan Wangji, and that changed the dynamic between them enough that I didn't even think they were the same characters anymore. I really liked the fic! It was well written and I liked the characters being written about. But I kept going, "This is not actually Wangxian fic."
So for me the spectrum goes:
As a writer, I stay pretty firmly in the A and B areas about 90% of the time, though sometimes I will venture out into C and every once in a while I will do a full-on E re-write. But even when I completely change the setting, I never make them truly mundane where they're just normal people living contemporary lives; I write, like, a Star Trek AU or something dystopian/post-apocalyptic. I have zero desire to write about any character I love having a normal life if that's not the kind of fandom they originate in. I actually don't understand the appeal of E-G kinds of stories as a writer; I would just write original fic instead. But they are very popular so clearly other people feel differently.
As a reader, I stay with A-B and a little bit of C for most fandoms. It's only in fandoms where I've read a ton of fic that I'm willing to venture further out into the other letters.
What about y'all? What do you prefer to read or write? Or is my spectrum just completely wrong and not the way you think of fic at all?
I am just curious about how people feel about them and what you feel their relationship to canon is.
When I first get into a fandom, I have ZERO interest in reading these kinds of stories. I am there for the fic that explores the world of the text--missing scenes, post-canon, fix-it fics, and especially canon divergence. I will pass mundane AUs by.
Once I've been in the fandom for a long time and read a lot of fic, I sometimes can enjoy mundane AUs. This happened to me with Infinite (where a mundane AU is literally anything where they're not idols) and with The Untamed fandoms. I read quite a bit of Untamed mundane AUs to this day.
And yet...I don't really feel like they're fanfic in the same way that more canon-observant fics are. There are some that do a marvelous job of adapting all the beats of canon--the character dynamics, the plot points--to a different setting. Those are rare and masterful, and I'm impressed by them. But the rest are just...the characters being written about have the character's faces and some of their personality traits, but that's about it.
Obviously, this is all a spectrum. But there are some that venture so far from canon that I feel like I'm reading an original work of fiction. And I can enjoy some of those, even love them, but I don't love them as fanfiction, I love them as original fiction.
It's interesting to think about how far it has to diverge from canon to not be fanfiction to me. I was reading a Wangxian fic this week that had the same kind of mundane AU plot I'd read before, but this one immediately went to the "this is not fanfiction" realm for me because Wei Wuxian was a lot older than Lan Wangji, and that changed the dynamic between them enough that I didn't even think they were the same characters anymore. I really liked the fic! It was well written and I liked the characters being written about. But I kept going, "This is not actually Wangxian fic."
So for me the spectrum goes:
canon-adherent (either a missing scene or pre- or post-canon fic)
|
|
| A
|
|
pivot moment divergence (where just one or two things change, and we explore what repercussions that has)
|
|
| B
|
|
complete plot divergence (where we're still in the same world and operating by the rules of canon, but the plot is completely different than canon)
|
|
| C
|
|
setting tweaks (say, you add daemons or the characters are suddenly royalty or they have some kind of magical powers they don't have in canon, but it's still loosely recognizable as the same world
|
|
| D
|
|
setting-change AUs (where we're in a completely different setting but you're still trying to translate as much of canon as possible, trying to hit the same beats and get the characterization and relationships just right
|
|
| E
|
|
setting and plot change AUs (where the characters are clearly inspired by their canon personalities, but they're operating under such different conditions that the relationship is becoming tenuous
|
|
| F
|
|
this isn't even fanfic anymore (you've crossed a line--probably a subjective one--wherein the reader is like, "Okay, this essentially has nothing to do with canon other than me picturing the same faces and bodies" but it may be a good enough story to stand on its own)
|
|
| G
As a writer, I stay pretty firmly in the A and B areas about 90% of the time, though sometimes I will venture out into C and every once in a while I will do a full-on E re-write. But even when I completely change the setting, I never make them truly mundane where they're just normal people living contemporary lives; I write, like, a Star Trek AU or something dystopian/post-apocalyptic. I have zero desire to write about any character I love having a normal life if that's not the kind of fandom they originate in. I actually don't understand the appeal of E-G kinds of stories as a writer; I would just write original fic instead. But they are very popular so clearly other people feel differently.
As a reader, I stay with A-B and a little bit of C for most fandoms. It's only in fandoms where I've read a ton of fic that I'm willing to venture further out into the other letters.
What about y'all? What do you prefer to read or write? Or is my spectrum just completely wrong and not the way you think of fic at all?
no subject
I'm not necessarily looking to replicate/exactly reflect canon or give myself more of something that precisely reminds me as canon. I see writing as a conversation I can have with canon or a way to tease out pieces of canon I want to explore in ways that are impossible if I constrain myself to writing a canon-observant story. The theme I want to play with will usually dictate everything else about the story and from there I'll take what I know of the canon characters and try to make it in-character for how they'd react in that new situation/setting.
Oh, yeah, same. I actually rarely write missing and I am mostly in the divergence camp because that's what's most interesting to me as both a reader and writer.
It's a conversation with the canon, even when the setting is so far removed.
Yeah, I think it's just a matter of...whether a reader/writer's interest can be sustained when it's that far removed. Most of the time, my can't (and it almost never can as a writer). But, like, the whole joy of fandom is doing whatever the hell you want, and there are clearly lots of people who enjoy the conversations that I find barely tethered to the original.
it's entirely dependent on how dynamic I find the ship to be. If they are completely compelling to me, I'll usually have an easy time of enjoying it. If I like the ship because of the plot circumstances/their canon jobs/whatever, then I have a harder time venturing out.
That's really interesting and insightful! Do you only write/reader shippy fic? Is it the same with gen things?
I write and read a ton of shippy fic, but I don't think of myself as just a ship-writer/reader, since I also really love gen fic and often find, say, family relationships every bit as compelling as romantic/sexual ones, but I find its a lot harder to remove those from context. It strikes me that the stuff in the E-G zone is almost always shippy--you don't see gen stuff in that zone very much. I feel like there must be something about a romantic/sexual relationship that makes people feel like they can...go a little further from canon while still remaining tethered enough to it for their own tastes.
no subject
I'm 99% of the time a ship fic writer, but I'll read gen from time to time. I'm mostly in fandom for the queer romantic reads and find sexuality exploration to be the most interesting thing to read about and write, so that largely necessitates some kind of romantic/sexual content (though not always). I think that's partly because I can get my need for gen content filled by other novels, movies, tv shows, etc. in a wide variety of genres. It's so much rarer for me to find deep queer romantic explorations outside of fic that so thoroughly fulfill the cravings I have for that kind of art.
Gen things pretty much always have to be set in canon for me to enjoy them. I agree with you totally that it's more context dependent for me.
I feel like there must be something about a romantic/sexual relationship that makes people feel like they can...go a little further from canon while still remaining tethered enough to it for their own tastes.
Yeah, definitely. Now I'm going to be stuck wondering why it is ahaha. Maybe at least for me it's a bit tied in with the I get my gen needs filled in other ways, but I don't think that necessarily explains it overall. I wonder also if it's simply a matter of romance being such a dominant, established genre all on its own with a ton of expected beats that most people know, while gen can really be spun in a million different directions without an easy beat sheet to go with it unless it also falls under a specific genre? Like... it's easy (comparatively) to build a romance arc in whatever setting/plot, but figuring out what kind of family drama to tell (as an example) is more nebulous? So for people who write gen, keeping close to canon is at least somewhat a scaffolding they can build off of, while romance writers have a built-in scaffold to work from that transfers so easily? I have no idea. I'm spitballing in your comments now lol. It's an interesting observation, for sure.