A Question about Fannish Terminology

[attackfish]

sholio wrote an essay just recently about why Steve/Bucky AUs don't work for her (the AU part, not the Steve/Bucky part) and quite apart from the contents of the essay, it got me wondering about what we call AUs in fandom currently.  Back when I got started, *crotchety old fan voice* things like high school AUs and coffee shop AUs were called "ARs", or Alternate Reality fics whereas  "AU" referred more broadly to both ARs and also "what if" stories.  However, sholio only talked about AR-style AUs, and a number of her points don't really work for what if AUs.  A while back, I ran an Avatar: the Last Airbender AU meme, and after getting almost exclusively AR prompts (and most of those for fusions) I had to explain that what if prompts were definitely also accepted.  I periodically see meta about how the writer of said meta doesn't think AUs are enough like canon, then goes on to describe only AR-style AUs.

Did the meaning of AU narrow  and I didn't realize it? I would kind of like to know, most of what I write other than drabbles are what-ifs.  What if Lupin bit Snape when they were in school, what if Azula captured Zuko at the beginning of  "The Southern Raiders," what if Iroh died when he drank white jade tea. The story I'm working on right now is a what if: what if those Earth Kingdom soldiers in Book One had managed to capture Iroh and Zuko and take them to Ba Sing Se.  If these aren't AUs, I kind of would like to know what to call them.

Comments

[attackfish]

I am a creaky old lady fan who remembers terms like AR. And I'm only 25.

Anyway, it kind of feels like being in my sociology of religion class, and my teacher is talking about the functional purpose of religion in a society, when he's really talking about the functional purpose of Christianity in Western society. I keep wanting to go "no, these don't fit! What about them?" And then when I mention them, everyone's like "Oh yeah, them too." So people include canon-divergent/what if AUs under the umbrella of AUs, but then when they meta about AUs, or are asked for AU prompts, or whatever, they orget all about them.

[opusculasedfera]

Heh, you and me both, sister.

That's a good analogy. It is really weird how AU is sort of morphing into "plot ideas" when people talk about it in the abstract, when those ideas may or may not be AUs depending on the fandom you choose to write them in, or even how you choose to write them. Don't we already have 'prompts' to cover that?

[attackfish]

Lizbee was just talking about that with "universal fandom" AU prompts and seeing things like "drunk at a party AU". Erm, how is that AU exactly? In like, almost any fandom?

[opusculasedfera]

I think sholio's got the right of it: some people are so focused on the meeting between the members of their ship that that's their default state of affairs for any plot so they come up with these bizarre "AUs" because they don't bother to state that these are about the meet cute, which obviously happened differently in canon. Which makes it not exactly a universal sort of AU when a lot of people aren't interested in alternative relationship structures except, actually, in canon AUs!

Leaving aside as well the fact that virtually the most boringly typical way for humans to meet is while slightly intoxicated at a festivity. :P Not that you can't write that well, but dang, sometimes these plot ideas seem really dull compared to the SFFnal shows I know the prompters are mostly writing in. Hmmmm, put like that, I wonder if this formulation came out of J2 or one of the other media RPF fandoms that seem to spawn a lot of AUs that are almost like original movies with the actors in mind for the leads. It seems to be more recent though, so perhaps not.

[attackfish]

Wow, I didn't even think about shippers and alternate meetings. I'm such a dweeb. Maybe it's because I'm really not much of a shipper (I thought I was a hopeless gen addict until I found A:tLA and Maiko)or maybe it's because like Sholio, it's because all my favorite relationships, romantic or otherwise, are interesting to me in large part because of their shared history, but I seriously didn't even connect those prompts to shipping.

I've actually written a gen drunk at a party fic, in which nobody meets anybody for the first time, with post-canon Ty Lee putting a drunk Suki to bed, which is another reason I didn't connect that prompt to first meetings or shipping.

[opusculasedfera]

I honestly didn't really notice or at least not even put it all together until we were having this conversation and I was thinking about why people put together those lists like that. But there have been a couple go past on my tumblr dash that are explicitly lists of alternate meetings, and the rest of them do make more sense if you think of them like that.

See, that's perfectly reasonable! There's nothing wrong with alcohol and parties, I have also used them as an incident in multiple fics, I just don't understand why people would take a couple who met, say, travelling across the world to incite revolution or in a complicated and emotionally fraught court situation, to bring it back to AtLA, and have their entire story be that they have some mutual friends and met while tipsy at someone's house, generally in modern North America. It's just so much less intrinsically interesting, why make work for yourself? It's not why I'm in the fandom, at any rate.

[attackfish]

I do have a few hundred words of a high school AU I wrote for a commentfic meme in which Sokka tries to throw a drunken house party for Aang while grandpa Gyatso is out of town, and the only person who shows up other than Katara and Toph is some dweeb named Zuko, but I never felt any need to take it beyond the short scenes written for that meme. That kind of thing just doesn't hold my interest. *shrug*