[ SECRET POST #4153 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4153 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Power Rangers Hyperforce]


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[That 70s Show]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #594.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's a basically a question of what elements of the original canon you think are interesting. For me, and I think for most people, I'm not solely interested in the fantastical or supernatural elements of a given canon. I don't care about Spock because he's a Vulcan; I'm interested in his character, as a character. So, when it comes to fic and AU, different people are going to focus on different things.

I mean, sometimes those stories are boring anyway, but I don't get the idea that the only appealing thing about these stories is their supernatural or sci-fi elements.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure that's the best example to pick, since the fact that Spock's a Vulcan, or more specifically a half-Vulcan, is a huge part of his self-identity and his struggles with the different elements of his nature. Experiences and identities are also huge parts of who characters are, and depending on their importance you have to ask how much of the character is left/changed without them. If Spock wasn't a child of two worlds and didn't have to struggle so much to find a balance between them, how much would he still be Spock?

I mean, I know there are close mundane equivalents, especially in sci-fi like Trek TOS where a lot of the stories were based on loosely-disguised real world issues. You don't have to focus on the exact experiences themselves to explore the character, and as you say different people are interested in different elements of a story/character. But you also say that the supernatural/sci-fi elements are not the only appealing thing, and the inverse of that is also true. Sometimes the supernatural/sci-fi elements do bring things to stories and characters that mundane equivalents can't. Spock as a man from two planets, Spock who struggles with his own emotions but can feel those of others with a touch, Spock as a man who can literally gift his soul to someone else to stay alive and be forced to deal with the fallout from that ... those are all also parts of who he is, and they're parts that I think a mundane AU would find difficult to replicate. The world a character lives in informs a lot of who they are, after all.

[(Anonymous)]

I definitely take your point, but I'm not sure I agree with it.

The thing is, at the end of the day, no AU is capable of accurately representing every element of the source canon. If they were capable of doing so, they wouldn't be AUs. Every AU (really, every fanfic) has to depart from the source material, at least in some sense. So we're always going to be talking about translation from the source material to a new idiom, and distance and alteration, and stuff like that.

So, yeah, a Spock who isn't half-Vulcan and half-human isn't going to be exactly equivalent to TOS!Spock. But it can still be close, and it can still be recognizably the same character, and you can still potentially do interesting things or tell interesting stories or get a different angle on the character by transposing them to a different setting or context. Even though, no, it won't be exactly the same.

(Also, "fully human Spock" was actually an example of the kind of AU that OP said that they were fine with, just for the record. Also, there are actually multiple canonically different Spock characters in the Star Trek universe who have distinctly different life experiences while still being recognizably the same character already, so this kind of thing isn't even really limited to fanfic.)

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, I know all AUs are going to diverge. My point was more that setting changes of that magnitude will necessitate some fairly significant character changes as well, so even if characters are where your interest lies, changing the setting may still change that as well. Sometimes drastically. A blanket statement that 'I'm here for the characters not the setting, so setting changes won't bother me' isn't necessarily going to hold true, if changing the setting changes something fundamental about the character.

(Also, I would argue with you a bit on the the canonical other Spocks. While Mirror!Spock and AOS!Spock do recognisably come from the same root, they are certainly not the same character in the sense that you could replace one with another and not have it change everything around them. Mirror!Spock might still have echoes TOS!Spock's honour and logic, but he is willing to do things that TOS!Spock would die before countenancing, and it does make a significant difference to his character. They have the same face and many of the same character traits, but by the time we meet them they are definitely NOT the same person, and as characters we react to them differently. Even the AOS crew are different in many ways from their Prime counterparts, and one is not interchangeable with the other.)

I think my base point is that, yes, AUs change things and that's what makes them interesting, but setting changes are not necessarily separate from character changes. The sci-fi/supernatural elements do more than change the genre and plot, they change the people in it as well. Spock as a character is more than a collection of personality traits, he is a product of his time and his place, his race and his culture, his actions and his abilities. Spock of the Mirror Universe is a different character to Spock of the Prime Universe, and Spock-the-human would be a different character to Spock-the-half-Vulcan as well.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be interesting. I'm just saying that characters aren't independent of the universes they're in.

[(Anonymous)]

IA with the point that characters aren't independent of the universes they're in. It's definitely something that affects it, you can't separate them out.

[(Anonymous)]

This. I feel like once you start taking a character too far away from the canon circumstances that shaped their life, they stop being that character and start being just an OC with a familiar face. In which case... why not just write an OC? Why try to pretend that this OC with Spock's face has anything to do with the actual canon Spock? Because it doesn't, not when you strip him of all of the elements from his canon that make him who he is.

[(Anonymous)]

But, again, the same could be said of all AUs

[(Anonymous)]

Not especially, no. I mean, if you have a terrible, terrible writer then sure, all scenarios are equally OOC and tenuous. But otherwise, Spock's characterization should be less affected by, say, a Star Trek wingfic AU than in the "It's the crew of the Enterprise except it's 2018 and there's no federation and no one's an alien and they all work at a coffee shop and Chekov goes to my highschool!" dreck that's being discussed in this secret. However, if that dreck's your thing, then go for it. There's obviously a market and we all like our fair share of trash. You don't need my or OP's approval to read or write whatever you want, and I'll take a tag full of ridiculous modern-day coffee shop fluff over one more a/b/o-verse.

[(Anonymous)]

For me, the big fun of AUs is 1) trying to create really appropriate parallels. Biracial spock is sort of obvious, but you can have him wrestle with feeling trapped between two worlds. What kind of human life would create a person who was actually a version of Spock, and not a spockface OC? For some people that's a really interesting question.

(For a more involved example...I always kind of wanted to write a humanstuck AU where Karkat had AIDS in maybe the 90s. None of the tragic backstory elements I ever read in AUs seemed like they really matched what it meant for him to have candy red blood on Alternia: the living under a death sentence, the betrayal by his body, the way (he imagines) it would make him a social pariah if it were ever discovered, the need to hide illness/injury, and so on. I never wrote it because I didn't have time to do enough research to do it right/respectfully, but the idea still intrigues me.)

OR

2) trying to hold some things exactly the same, but letting him become a genuinely completely different person in other circumstances. And this is completely uninteresting to me as an OC, because this alternate Spock explores the nature/nurture question. The differences are interesting because the canon version exists to compare it to metatextually.

Best of all are the AUs that do both. What's Spock like if Sarek is strict traditional confucian chinese, and the emphasis on logic is replaced with an emphasis on propriety? You still have the spock's need for outward emotional control, certainly still his selflessness and dedication to duty. Is his rebellion against Vulcan by going to Starfleet instead of the VSA more or less pointed when part of the dual identity he wrestles with revolves heavily around respect for the father? There's no obvious answer. But any thoughtful answer would make a good story, and it's a much more interesting one in the *context* of this new person being explicitly framed as someone Spock *could* be.