Snowflake Challenge #3: addendum

[pensnest]

Reading other people's answers to the AU question, it seems to me that there are widely divergent ideas on what constitutes an AU.

For me, an AU is a different world setting. Whether it's real-world with Our Heroes working as entrepreneurs/farmers/roller derby professionals, or a fantasy world with peasants, wizards or dragons, or a futuristic world with spaceships or robots, that's surely an AU.

For me, something like magic does not *necessarily* mean an AU. In popslash, I've read plenty of stories in which there is Something Weird, but the story is based in canon, so I don't count it as an AU. If someone becomes invisible, or gains telepathy, or Wakes Up As A Girl, or swaps bodies—no, not an AU. Just* Crack. A setting where all of them are superheroes, or magicians, or have the ability to channel the colour green (I don't know, it's just an example), that's an AU.

But it's sometimes hard to tell where the line is. Is a gender-swapped story in which Character A has *always* been of the opposite sex an AU? I'm inclined to narrow it down more and call it a gender swap, and regard that as a separate category... yet mostly, the genderswaps I've read have been temporary, and usually crack, so maybe a "the world has always been this way" story is properly classified as an AU.

Is a canon-divergent story an AU or an 'Alternate Timeline' or some such? I'm inclined to call it a 'fork in the road' story, because it starts with canon and goes somewhere else, whereas to me, an AU does not start with canon. But there's a case to be made for calling such stories AUs.

Is an A/b/o story an AU or does it get its own category? (My opinion: the latter. So that I can avoid it, and the people who want to read it can find it.) Maybe it's a specific AU-there's a huge list of them on AO3.

A story in which there are vampires but within the canon setting - gets a 'vampires' tag but not an AU tag. To be an AU, the setting would have to be not-canon. If, say, Joey goes vampire hunting late at night while he and the guys are rehearsing for the next tour, that gets a vampire tag. If all the guys are vampires who live in Brooklyn and have elaborate lifestyles which enable them never to see the sun, that's definitely an AU. With a vampire tag. If Lance is impregnated by an alien, that's crack. If Lance and the rest of them are aliens and live on Planet Zooglecrab, it's an AU. Somewhere in between the two there is probably a line.....

Some people label as AUs what I would label as crack. Other lines are harder to define.

Opinions?





* Crack is not "just" at all, it is awesome, but perhaps that'll show up in later prompts.

Comments

[paulamcg]

Thank you for taking up those divergent ideas! About canon-divergent fics, for instance! :) I never thought I'd call my canon-consistent-until-the-end-of-book-five fic AU, but when I tried to tag it canon-divergent, AO3 offered Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence.

[pensnest]

I suppose AO3 is becoming the arbiter, because it has such a big umbrella - individual fandoms maybe have their own conventions. I know when I wrote popslash regularly I never bothered with ratings, f'rinstance, but these days it's something I at least have to consider when posting a fic.

[turps]

I fear my opinion is stuck on the fact that Lance and his alien boyband friends who live on Planet Zooglecrab is something that needs to be written.

Especially if Lance is impregnated.

But to bring it back to your post, the line would obviously be Lance being impregnated by alien Joey, Chris, JC and Justin, and that he'd have quads -- who he dresses like gnomes.

Though thinking about it, you never suggested the aliens are actually Lance's friends. It could also be an angsty AU!

And now I'll go and leave you to have sensible discussions on your interesting post.

[pensnest]

*dies* I think that one might have qualified for the "stories you think I will never write" meme!

[smallhobbit]

I suspect I fall somewhere in the middle. For instance, my werewolf!Lucas series I count as AU because I've written a number, whereas if it had been one fic I wouldn't have called it an AU - for instance the Lewis fic where Lewis and Hathaway become rabbits is simply crack. I suppose because for both werewolf!Lucas and the ACD Holmes Ocelot & Gang I'm creating my own 'verse, so it is an alternate universe.

[pensnest]

I am so charmed by the notion of Lewis and Hathaway becoming rabbits.

I suppose what it comes down to is, fandom is *such* a big tent we can all find space to say what we want to say, and canon is a foundation, not a ceiling.

[dine]

is it nice on Planet Zooglecrab? I mean, I'm always interested in possible future vacation spots (which I shall never actually visit)

I can definitely see your definitions, though out of laziness I've been more likely to lump anything other than a standard "follows canon closely" story as an AU

[pensnest]

I am beginning to suspect there will have to be a Planet Zooglecrab story in my future.

Also that we each and every one of us have a slightly definition of AU!

[corvidology]

I agree. For me, anything that removes the characters from their canon is full-on AU.

Anything that keeps them in their canon but changes something else is going to be labelled with one of those other options like crack, crossover, trope, pre-canon, etc. If the characters turn left instead of right that's canon divergence.

To complicate things, I've always considered fusion fics to be AU if you move the characters into the other setting - MCU characters go to Hogwarts - but they'd get a different sort of label if MCU characters suddenly had daemons or were sentinels but nothing else about the canon changed... but then I'm not a fan of fusion fic, so there's that. :D

[pensnest]

I think we are in splendid accord here. There seem to be so many fandom labels for things, it ought to be possible to be reasonably specific.

I don't think I've defined my very occasional crossovers (popslash with Harry Potter or ST:TNG) as AUs, simply because I've just called them crossovers. 'Fusion' is perhaps a more recent term? But something where the regular characters have daemons definitely doesn't feel like an AU either, so I guess I'd have to go with crossover again.

I don't perpetrate a lot of fusion fic, but I enjoy it when the author can really justify it for me. Sometimes it just seems to be done because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it ought to say something fresh about either the characters or the world, or even both.

[corvidology]

From Fanlore: Fusion vs. Crossover vs. AU
Discussion is ongoing as to the relationship between fusions, crossovers and AUs. Some regard fusions as a subset or specialized form of crossover, whereas others consider fusions a parallel form, describing crossovers as works where multiple source canons temporarily intersect but remain essentially independent. Alternately, it’s possible to look at all fusions as essentially AU in nature, or to assert that some serve merely as extensions to one or all of their source canons.

Clear as mud, eh?

In my part of fandom, they always said a crossover was where the characters from two or more canons met and a fusion was when you moved one set of characters into the other canon and wrote it like it had always been their canon.

[pensnest]

A nice distinction - I like it. So my "Lance is a Slytherin, Chris is a Griffindor" story is a fusion, whereas my "boybanders appear on the Enterprise-D" story is a crossover. Works for me!

[minoanmiss]

*reads and contemplates*

[pensnest]

I'm glad to have provided you with food for thought! :-D

[writedragon]

As a "relatively new" fic writer (less than 8 years at this), these designations still bedevil me when it's time to tag. All fic is, I guess, by definition, "canon divergent", so for me to use the "canon divergent" tag it would be a matter of degree (e.g. a character doesn't die or something pretty significant like that).

By the definitions you list above I've only written 2 true AUs -- one a barbershop AU and one a Noir detective story. Writing AUs feels much more like walking a tightrope without a net than, say, a crossover because at least with the crossovers there are two canons to anchor the writing, and the canons I choose to cross always have plausibility built in. Locations and time frames have to be within reasonable distance of each other for me to write a crossover, and there has to be some plausible reason for character A (in one canon) to end up in character B's (in another canon) orbit.

That said, crack is its own beast wherein all bets are off.

[pensnest]

I got very excited for a moment there seeing you have written a barbershop AU, and then I thought, no, it's probably concerned with haircuts.

I like the "you can't prove it didn't happen!" kind of canon writing, that fits snugly alongside the canon we see but delves into the bits we can't see. But then, RPF canon is different and besides, I'm a popslasher, and sometimes lose my grip on reality. I remember thinking a story of mine fitted into that category and then realising that no, wait, one of my characters was turned into a teddybear in that story. Which you can't *prove* didn't happen, but..... well, probably don't need to.

AUs are more of a challenge in certain respects, because we're creating more than we are with in-canon fic. That's where we discover why the writers of a TV show failed to provide X element of backstory—because they didn't need it until they needed it. And an unreal world is harder still, because however fantastical it may be there still need to be rules. How does magic work, how is society structured, and so forth. I do approve, mostly, of canons that fit together with reasonable logic—then again, I slashed Adam Lambert with William Shakespeare, so it feels as though rules exist only so long as I don't want to break them! (I mean, once upon a time I would not have dreamed of writing about Real People.)

[writedragon]

Haha, yes, my barbarshop AU is the haircut kind not the singing kind (though that is a fun idea).

[pensnest]

I'd so like to see some barbershop singers fic!

[turlough]

Once again I completely agree with everything you wrote! (Popslash has clearly embedded itself deep into our brains :-)

[pensnest]

It definitely altered my opinions on many things!

Divergent opinions for thought

[stranger]

I'd call anything that changes the show/source significantly an alternate version of the show, and so AU, and the rest are subcategories of AU. (I may be way old school about this and terminology has moved on, but that is how my mind categorizes timeline forks, and fantasy backgrounds, or even Lance meeting aliens of any stripe.*) If something like a/b/o balloons to the point that it has thousands of examples in many fandoms, those are still alternate interpretations of the world the shows (well, *most* shows) give us. I think.

* Now, if Lance (in fiction) had got into the space program and eventually met Zooglecrabians that way, it's still Not What Happened, but it has a lot more basis in possible futures. Also, it becomes SF, and either all of SF is crack (arguable for funtimes), or it participates in the literary tradition of Mary Shelley and Hugo Gernsback, and lands on the best-seller lists. Unless one of the aliens is named Joey or Justin, in which case it's back to being fannish slash. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Amusingly, as a much younger me, I loved slash but I did consider that it was AU, in the sense that the overt show content in the 1970s clearly did not intend the characters to be gay/bi/etc. I got over that one by deciding many characters were remarkably easy to interpret as gay/inlove/bonking, even if Hollywood was still thinking in terms of the Hayes Code, and I as audience could see them as I *did* see them. The pictures and chemistry on the screen mattered, as much as the script with the throwaway girlfriend who never came back. And, maybe there was a reason she never came back, too... And so forth.

So things change, even labelling systems. But, I understand the "alternate" in AU in a very general sense, without it excluding other sub-genre labels to specify the kind of alteration that's going on. At the same time, "canon-compliant" means something, and the line where it doesn't quite apply is kind of blurred no matter what. Maybe this is quantum fandom.

Re: Divergent opinions for thought

[pensnest]

I once met someone in a Lush store who, from her conversation, I knew to be a keen Harry Potter fan. I made conversation, and it turned out we were both fanfic fans. And thus had more in common than I would have had in common with any 'normal' Nsync fans! Some fannish tropes/notions are like that, I think—so it is quite possible that the a/b/o thing has crossed into many fandoms, and some people will love it so much they'd rather read a/b/o in a semi-familiar fandom than a different story in a fandom they know well.

I think Lance meeting Zooglecrabians via the space program would probably end up (if I wrote it) as pure and utter crack. Not, indeed, that there is anything wrong with that.

Perhaps quantum fandom is inevitable, because we all have our own slightly different interpretations of *everything*, from the canon that is presented to us on a screen, to the definitions of our own creations. And even if we could agree, this year, on What Is An AU, there'll be half a dozen new opinions along next year.