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Or, today's pondering: when is an AU like a fanfic? And when is it not?
Ordinarily I stick to 'What if" AUs - they spin off canon at a certain point or they may be canon shifted one-reality-to-the-left, but they're still pretty similar and recognizably tied to canon. And there I try to do the work to earn any variation from the characters we know (e.g. Sam and Kara are very different in 'Black Sails' than they were at the mirror point in canon, but that's many thousands of words later and very different events happening to them, so I think it follows). My Nellis-verse AU is more AU (Modern Earth setting), but I think still recognizably them if definitely a less angsty, broken versions.
But it does seem with farther AUs that a writer runs the risk of it becoming Original Fic with no real attachment to the source anymore, or worse, making caricatures of the actual characters. I know I've read AUs in the past where it seemed only one character trait comes through, so it gets cartoony. And maybe that happens because the author fears changing the characters too much to fit with the new setting so they lean heavily on that one familiar trait, or catchphrase, or what-have-you (Kara's a bitch! Sam is nice! Roslin is stern!). And yet, that does beg the question of how much CAN you change and still call it fanfic? Well, yes, obviously authors can call it that (plagiarists often get away with changing the names from other fanfic, which tells you that a lot of fanfic isn't that specific to the source at all). It's not as if anyone will disagree, but still, it feels to me that if all you've carried across is the names and a few general relationships, what's left?
Promethean Fires - my NaNo started out as an AU, but it started to drift so much I wrote it as an original fic. It definitely crossed the line at least in my mind. But I'm not sure I know where the line is.
This is on my mind because of this Western AU I'm writing. It's still fanfic in the sense that it's loosely based on BSG, and I want to keep it as fanfic, but the characters are quite altered. They don't TALK the same, for one thing and since voice is one of the things that ties me to the characters, it feels very different. I'm still writing it, since I find it fun to write a different style, but at the same time, I admit it makes me wonder.
Where's the line for you, as reader or writer?
(and yes, that's my new icon for the fic. hee)
Ordinarily I stick to 'What if" AUs - they spin off canon at a certain point or they may be canon shifted one-reality-to-the-left, but they're still pretty similar and recognizably tied to canon. And there I try to do the work to earn any variation from the characters we know (e.g. Sam and Kara are very different in 'Black Sails' than they were at the mirror point in canon, but that's many thousands of words later and very different events happening to them, so I think it follows). My Nellis-verse AU is more AU (Modern Earth setting), but I think still recognizably them if definitely a less angsty, broken versions.
But it does seem with farther AUs that a writer runs the risk of it becoming Original Fic with no real attachment to the source anymore, or worse, making caricatures of the actual characters. I know I've read AUs in the past where it seemed only one character trait comes through, so it gets cartoony. And maybe that happens because the author fears changing the characters too much to fit with the new setting so they lean heavily on that one familiar trait, or catchphrase, or what-have-you (Kara's a bitch! Sam is nice! Roslin is stern!). And yet, that does beg the question of how much CAN you change and still call it fanfic? Well, yes, obviously authors can call it that (plagiarists often get away with changing the names from other fanfic, which tells you that a lot of fanfic isn't that specific to the source at all). It's not as if anyone will disagree, but still, it feels to me that if all you've carried across is the names and a few general relationships, what's left?
Promethean Fires - my NaNo started out as an AU, but it started to drift so much I wrote it as an original fic. It definitely crossed the line at least in my mind. But I'm not sure I know where the line is.
This is on my mind because of this Western AU I'm writing. It's still fanfic in the sense that it's loosely based on BSG, and I want to keep it as fanfic, but the characters are quite altered. They don't TALK the same, for one thing and since voice is one of the things that ties me to the characters, it feels very different. I'm still writing it, since I find it fun to write a different style, but at the same time, I admit it makes me wonder.
Where's the line for you, as reader or writer?
(and yes, that's my new icon for the fic. hee)
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