Thoughts on AUs

[jennickels]

So, the third day of the snowflake_challenge is to write about AUs.

I will admit that for a good portion of my fandom years, I didn't like AUs--I mean the kind that completely changes the setting of the canon. I just didn't see the point in them. All those high school AUs or coffeeshop AUs. At the time, I read/wrote mostly in sci-fi fandoms and couldn't fathom why I would want to take the characters out of their canon setting which was part of what made them interesting in the first place.

Things changed, though, when I got into The 100 fandom back in 2015 or so. Out of curiosity, I read a couple modern AUs because the summaries sounded interesting. And wouldn't you know it--I got kind of hooked. They became a guilty pleasure, and I gobbled up all the modern AUs I could find for a while. I think that came with wanting the characters to just have some quiet time together which is nearly impossible within their canon setting where their lives were constantly in danger.

A funny thing... I'm actually working on a The 100 modern AU right now. I wrote most of the story in 2016 and did major edits in 2017, but then got sidetracked with other stories. One of my goals this year is to add to or edit some WIPs I have going so I dragged this one out of a drawer (a literal drawer because I was editing on paper at the time) and decided to type up all of the chances I made years ago.

The story takes the characters and puts them in a modern setting where they are camping out which I thought was kind of funny because they basically live camping out in canon, but in the modern world there is no one around to try and kill them. The characters are also aged up to college age so they all have stuff in common.

It's not the greatest story, but I remember it was the first modern AU I wrote and had a lot of fun with it. I wrote a few others after that, but I can't really remember them off hand. I'm much better at canon-divergent AUs than modern takes or completely different settings.

There is one sort of alternate setting/fusion AU that I always imagine ideas for but never seriously intend to write, and that's dinosaurs. The first of these ideas came to me when I was writing a canon-divergent AU for Stargate SG-1 where I plotted things out like episodes and had a two-parter where they go to a planet that has dinosaurs. At the time I had recently seen Jurassic World so that was on my mind, but the story wasn't a fusion since Jurassic World doesn't exist at their time or anything. The dinosaurs were natural inhabitants of the planet for unknown reasons. 

I remember as I plotted out the "episode," I took a lot of inspiration from the Jurassic Park/World movies which was a lot of fun.

Since then, I've come up with other dinosaur AUs because I guess I just really want my characters to run into dinosaurs. There was an idea for a The 100 fic set late in the series when they arrive at a new planet. In my AU, the planet is, of course, already inhabited by dinos. Another was for Avatar the Last Airbender where Katara and Zuko get trapped in a little valley that happens to be full of hybrid dinosaur-like creatures and they have to work together to escape. This was set between books 1 and 2 so they're still enemies so lots of potential for drama and angst.

Most recently, I came up with a literal fusion between Jurassic Park and Ouran High School Host Club where the Twins suggest the Host Club go on vacation to Costa Rica because they heard about this haunted, run-down amusement park on an island off the coast. I never got farther than that, but I laughed that I had somehow get dinos into a fandom about Japanese high school students.

I guess it's become sort of tradition now that I come up with a dinosaur AU for whatever fandom I'm into.

Not that I ever intend to write these stories. Because of my chronic fatigue and brain fog, the most I can really do is come up with ideas. I do have a lot of fun just imagining the stories. I wish I could share them with people, but it's just not in the cards anymore. I've forgotten how to write, but I can at least, entertain myself.