[ 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 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.