[ SECRET POST #4214 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4214 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 14 secrets from Secret Submission Post #603.
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)]

AUs (save for canon AUs, like "how would the story have gone if X hadn't died" or "what if Y had been the chosen one instead of Z") are something I just honestly do not understand the appeal of. If you take, say, Wonder Woman and put her into a modern coffeeshop AU or whatever, how is that interesting at all? She isn't Wonder Woman anymore without her canon background, she's just some random pretty woman who shares a name with Wonder Woman. And why would someone who likes Wonder Woman want to read about that? I don't get it.

There are two answers to that, that I've found.

[(Anonymous)]

One, they like the personality of the character, irrespective of what her abilities are. This one only holds if the character has a roughly similar personality.

Two, they like the way the character looks (not necessarily the actor since their look can change a lot for different roles) and are fancasting the character into their story

[(Anonymous)]

Modern AUs are kind of a bad example because they are rarely written well, but I think the appeal is taking a character you know and putting them in a very different situation from their canon and seeing how they react. Also, I like when authors are creative in an AU. For instance, if there's an evil creature, how would you reimagine that in a modern AU? Or how can you map the conflicts in a fantasy canon into everyday conflicts?

Like I said, you rarely get the depth for this but I think that's the appeal. I personally love the canon universes so I don't write modern AU but if there's one that really does nail the characterization and plays with the intersection of two radically different types of canon, I think that's interesting.

[(Anonymous)]

...but I think the appeal is taking a character you know and putting them in a very different situation from their canon and seeing how they react.

This is exactly why I write AUs. My favorite characters have very strong personality traits that can carry over to an AU while still keeping their "core", as it were, when you have a halfway decent writer doing it. I've seen how they react to their native environment in canon, so I like to extrapolate with "well, what if..?". They are going to react differently when in a dystopian AU versus an arranged marriage one. It's what helps keep my love of the characters going strong.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree, but I have no interest in mundane AUs of any kind, not even when my canon did it. Would I be interested in my canon but in space? Sure! In a coffee shop only with no powers? Hell no.

[nightscale]

Yeah this is me too. A different fantastical setting or a canon divergence is something I'd read, but a regular boring mundane setting like a coffee shop or high school? No thanks.

I like the characters because they have super-powers/magic, taking that away without replacing it with something is completely unappealing to me.

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly. And not only that, so many of my favorite characters are so shaped by their canon circumstances that if you took them away from that, they wouldn't be the same character at all. Edward Elric, for example... his entire life was shaped by his failed human transmutation that cost him his limbs and his brother Al his body. Put him in a setting where that never happened and he would be a completely different person, not the Edward Elric that I enjoyed the canon for.

[(Anonymous)]

A lot of the AUs that are most interesting to me are the ones that are really trying to find answers to questions like that. Like... how do you take a character like that, with that history, and translate that into a different genre? And then, when you put it against a different background, does that give us a different angle on the original character? What changes, what stays the same?