Snowflake Challenge: Challenge #3

[lebateleur]

Catching up on the challenges I've missed so far, today I tackle:

Challenge #3

In your own space, put some favorite characters into an AU, fuse some favorite canons together, talk about your favorite AU/fusion tropes, or tell us why AU/fusions aren’t your cup of tea. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

My initial reaction to this was, “Nope, AUs are not my thing,” but as it turns out, it’s a bit more complicated than that. When I first got into fandom, an AU was one of my favorite fics.

Namely, A Fish Called Krycek, which was a novella-length X-Files AU in which Mulder is a wildlife biologist-type researcher and Krycek is a mermaid. (I will pause here for a moment.) It was included with the second edition of an X-Files fanzine called Double eXposure (in which those in the know can also find the fourth fic that I, as a newly minted fanficcer, ever wrote. It was not very good.)

I was enchanted by this novella, despite the fact that Krycek (if I recall correctly) was not even capable of speech. So how did I go from that fan to the fan I am now, one who regularly lists heavy duty AUs as a DNW?

It’s probably due to a number of factors. A Fish Called Krycek dates to the days of Usenet, webrings, DIY fansites on Angelfire, Geocities, and Tripod. Search engines were new. Yahoo mailing groups were cutting edge. Fandom hadn’t been online before because there hadn’t been an “online” before. This was the first time—ever—that large numbers of geographically dispersed fans, of all ages and native languages, and very niche (and at the time socially verboten) shared interests could come together to communicate and create in real time. There was literally no history of online fandom, let alone established rules, norms, or expectations within it.

Flame wars and discourse didn’t exist yet either. This is not necessarily an unalloyed good thing—there are assumptions and biases built into fan communities that members need to question and reform to make them more welcoming places for all—but the lack of those things also meant that I was enthusiastic and willing to read or create things, before I had the experience and skill to evaluate or create them well, without fear of ridicule or hostility.

And things were just weirder. This was probably a combination of the fandom (aliens! Government experiments! Techno-magic!) and the novelty—again, any given X-Files MPREG/genderswap/high school AU I happened to encounter at the time was far likelier to be the first one, ever. Not just in X-Files fandom, but in any online fandom. That’s pretty wild. Reading old fics now—both mine and those I loved by other authors—I’m struck by how there was just an element of adventurousness and throwing caution to the winds that reminds me more of the anything-goes-ness of late 90s/early aughts BL than much of English-language fandom since.

But somewhere along the line, the fan communities I inhabited started to move toward a general consensus that faithful characterization (and frequently tone) was a paramount element of a “good” fic, even when the story diverged from canon, or rewrote the ending, or added vampires or time travel or whatever. And faithfully capturing the characterization (and tone) of canon is much harder to do in a hardcore AU. Similarly, the “XYZ Canon Characters...But Now They’re Werewolves!” set-up no longer has the novelty of being something I haven’t encountered before, which, because I do largely want fic to function as an extension of canon, means I'm going to nope out of loosely characterized AUs in a way I wouldn't have back in the day.

I’ve been hopping back and forth between writing this challenge response and archiving content from the soon-to-be-shuttered Echoes from the West, at which point I realized, Hold on, I’ve actually written an AU. And then I realized, No, I’ve written two. (For AEW, in which the Best Friends and Inner Circle engage in a Wild West shootout, and Saiyuki, in which I drop the Sanzo-Ikko into a British fairy tale.)

So maybe I should be making more of an effort to seek out good AUs? I’m honestly not sure how likely I am to try doing so any time soon (or regularly), but it is something this prompt has gotten me to chew over.

これで以上です。