Part I of this article, which ran yesterday, can be found here.
I didn’t start reading Jane Austen novels until my 20s – or rather, it was only after trying Pride and Prejudice for the fourth time that I finally got into it. While trying to get through them all, I also picked up the book A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz, which discusses the morality lessons of the Austen novels. Deresiewicz’s exploration of Emma is my favorite section of his book, a quote of which I want to extract here:
By eliminating all the big, noisy events that usually absorb all our interest when we read novels – the adventures and affairs, the romances and crises, even, at times, the plot – Austen was asking us to pay attention to the things we usually miss or don’t accord enough esteem, in novels or in life. Those small, “trivial,” everyday things, the things that happen hour by hour to the people in our lives: what your nephew said, what your friend heard, what your neighbor did. That, she was telling us, is what the fabric of our years really consists of. That is what life is really about.
This perfectly describes one of my favorite genre of fanfiction: Alternate Universe fanfiction, or AU fanfic. AU fanfic is something you find mostly dealing with action/adventure science fiction, but it does a curious thing and strips them of the science fiction — and most of the action and adventure –and places the characters in a smaller, cozier community. These AUs can be set in a coffee shop, a news agency, a high school, a college, etc. – anywhere people have to gather in large groups that tend to break up into communities (or regulars, as coffee shops are wont to have). Marvel Nine Nine is an AU of the MCU.
AUs focus on those everyday things. Instead of being blockbuster events of life and death, the characters’ relationships become the impetus, the focus, because underneath those explosions are the beating hearts of humanity.
I asked a few people who read and write fandom what their particular draws were. Charlotte Geater noted that her favorite AU was graduate students (incidentally, she’s a graduate student). Prolific fanfic writer Anna Andersen noted that several of her AU ideas came from a fanfic prompt called 30 cheesy tropes. “It’s been a really fun exercise,” she told me over email. “I try to do something that’s not obvious: I wrote a genderbent AU where Cas touched the staff of Tiresias and ended up in a female body; I wrote a desert island AU where they were Jack and Sawyer in LOST.”
New Yorker and AO3 writer and reader fennecfawkes says, “I don’t often write purely AU fics. I’m much more apt to set something within a fandom and tweak canon ever so slightly to allow, say, Coulson and Clint Barton to have some alone time. When I have done AU, it’s been high school and college stories, simply because it’s a lot of fun to write from a teenage perspective.”
The idea of high school AUs recall shows like X-Men Evolution and even the webcomic JL8, which puts members of the Justice League in elementary school (!).
There’s a common theme of work and the workplace in these AUs. “I have also read very involved AUs where superheroes are suddenly lawyers, or teachers,” notes Charlotte. “It’s a good way to easily throw together a lot of different people? I’m also a big fan of slow-burn and misunderstandings and pining and misery, which work well in a setting where people see each other a lot but not necessarily by choice.”
Anna says, “The impetus behind my long AU (the bookstore ‘verse) was honestly that I missed working in bookstores. The whole thing, in between the falling-in-love and porn, is a love letter to the concept of the independent bookstore. Which is very silly, and self-indulgent, and I sort of love it. (And I double-plus love it when commenters are like “I want to shop at this bookstore!”) YES. YES YOU DO.”
fennecfawkes likes reading stories that “feature those characters on different career paths—Tony Stark went into politics! Phil Coulson is a nursing professor! Thor is a carpenter for some reason!—or that re-cast them as superpower-free high school or college students.” In writing, she is “much more apt to set something within a fandom and tweak canon ever so slightly to allow, say, Coulson and Clint Barton to have some alone time. When I have done AU, it’s been high school and college stories, simply because it’s a lot of fun to write from a teenage perspective.”
Let’s examine a case study, one you don’t have to watch nine movies, a crappy TV show, and a fun one in order to understand. The plot of the movie Pacific Rim is simple: the world comes together against aliens (“kaiju”) moving through a rift in the Pacific Ocean by building giant robots (“jaegers”) that are powered by two people through a neurological connection called the Drift. You can watch the prologue here if you prefer Charlie Hunnam’s British idea of an American accent. Ridiculous. SO RIDICULOUS. But I love it.
And it gets EVEN MORE RIDICULOUS: The Drift requires that the co-pilots have a special connection. In the movie, proposed couples include husband and wife, father and son, and brothers, but the main plot comes through the burgeoning literal power couple Raleigh Beckett and Mako Mori, who learn they can make a great team, a connection not from their good looks (though they are both so incredibly gorgeous, oh my God) but from their chemistry in working together. The movie’s fast clip means each relationship is explored with all the subtlety of a telenovela – brother mourns brother, people die in battle, father and son work out their relationship, girl avenges her family – paired with the unruly excitement of robots fighting monsters.
A lot is glazed over: there’s only one main female character, characters are introduced but given little or no airtime, and the relative diversity is still not diverse enough for a story that involves international cooperation. What’s interesting about the movie for our purposes is that there are several AUs that rewrite the whole story exactly…minus the huge international crises. Instead of finding out that they are “Drift Compatible,” teachers Mako and Raleigh fall in love when she joins the school faculty. Instead of learning to pilot a Jaeger together, Raleigh helps Mako study for her engineering degree. Instead of avenging her family’s death at the claws of the giant kaiju Onibaba, Raleigh follows Mako’s plan to take down the corporation whose use of dangerous chemicals in foreign countries led to her parents’ fatal illnesses. In these reimagined stories, the small things take the place of robots versus monsters, with the characters at war with each other and themselves and the small injustices we face. It’s fair to say these stories are scaled down, but the reason these superhero movies are so compelling is that they turn small community stories into huge crises.
Often there are continuations of the storyline in Pacific Rim that include the characters who died in the movie, partly because the deaths in the movie are somewhat glanced over. The flipside of this is a superhero movie that makes a personal crisis the actual problem of the movie.
Big Hero 6 does have elements of large-scale destruction in the city of San Fransokyo, but not unlike Pacific Rim, it’s about a young man getting over his older brother’s tragic death with the help of a giant robot. Bilge Ebiri expands on this idea in his review:
“But it’s also rare for a film like this to have such a palpable sense of loss…the film keeps returning to this primal hurt. His brother’s death leaves a huge hole in Hiro’s already orphaned heart, and nothing — not even Baymax, really — can quite fill it. We’re reminded of this constantly….[H]ow we deal with loss eventually emerges as the film’s key theme….The loss gives a real urgency to this otherwise-familiar story of a boy and his robot. Here’s a kid who’s lost everything, you start thinking. Please don’t let him lose this, too.”
And maybe that’s it. In this case, fandom goes beyond the ideas that superhero movies are a reaction to terrorism. Those jokes, the silliness, the gathering of friends fighting over nothing and overcoming their personal obstacles and fighting small battles together. How we permanently change when we lose those people, how deeply it wounds us. That’s the reaction to the reaction: that these “everyday things” matter, very deeply, and should be cherished in an uncertain world.
Tags: comics, movies, sulagna misra, superheroes, television
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I LOVE AUs MORE THAN MOST THINGS
My current obsession are Bellamy/Clarke (from The 100) AUs, but I looooove them. Especially college ones because idk I just love awkward dorks who are dealing with school and growing up.
My favorite MCU AU is one where Steve is a tattoo artist and Darcy goes to him for a tattoo and they hook up and I LOVE THEM SFM. GIVE ME ALL THE AU RECS YOU GUYS
Yes! There are so many books/movies where I love the characters and enjoy spending time with them, and then the plot kicks in and it’s like, “Do we really have to do this?” THE WORLD’S END was like that, and whenever I see that AVENGERS 2 clip with Thor’s hammer, part of me thinks, “Man, can we get an alternate movie where Ultron never shows up and we just see the Avengers hang out for 2 hours please and thank you?”
I think that’s why Matt Fraction’s run of Hawkeye was so popular – people love seeing who superheroes are when they’re not faced with total crises. One of my favorite issues was the one in which younger Hawkeye runs off to California with the dog and becomes a teenage freelance detective.
There are only so many ways you can blow shit up before it starts to look all the same. What I’m looking for is believable human connections and conflicts in between the blowing-shit-up.
OOH, au recs i can do!! for various fandoms but mostly marvel:
ever after by busaikko, remus/sirius: http://archiveofourown.org/works/224959 (non-magic, university library AU)
you were standing there by thebrotherswinchester, steve/bucky and natasha/sam http://archiveofourown.org/works/1665494 (non-superhero AU)
put them back in poetry (if only i knew how) by singalellaby, carol danvers/jessica drew http://archiveofourown.org/works/1042409 (diner AU)
i’ve got nothing to do today but smile (the only living boy in new york) by gyzym, arthur/eames http://archiveofourown.org/works/135867 (coffee shop AU, the best one ever)
the rhythm in rush by mageticwave, steve/bucky but it’s gen really (and all the better for it, this is my favourite, and is the grad school AU of my dreams, i would read a million words of it) http://archiveofourown.org/works/2227665
I COULD LIST MORE but i will stop there for now
I love “I’ve Got Nothing to Do Today but Smile” SO MUCH. I first encountered it during a rough time in my life (stuck in both a job and a town I didn’t want to be in), and it was the most consoling thing I could possibly have read. I still revisit it from time to time. (Arthur! It’s OK! You don’t have to be a lawyer, you can bake brownies and fall in love!)
Yaaaaay, yes! I just finished reading an MCU AU where Bucky, still dealing with the loss of his arm while in the army, agrees to help his lifelong friend Steve explore Steve’s recently realized bi-curious tendencies to “save” him from having to resort to Craigslist. It was cute (and hot) and called Casual Encounters, of course.
“Time to stop taking a beating and start giving one.”
THE PARALLELS THO. Totally obsessed with the parallels between Matt and Fisk.
Girl, it is all TOO much.
SHIT HASN’T EVEN REMOTELY HIT THE FAN YET. BRACE YOUR DAMN SELF.
I’ll let you know. And thanks for being around for my sudden unpacking of realizing what a fanboy my dad was at heart, even if it didn’t look like it then, and how much we’re even MORE alike.
Plus I’m getting a total Sean Connery Jimmy Malone/Ramirez vibe off Stick.
What are you prepared to do? And THEN what are you prepared to do?
This song is strangely fitting even if it’s not its intention. https://youtu.be/ZWOuj_bkNRc
Seriously, I get a ridiculous amount of joy out of other people reacting to and enjoying the things I love, so I have been LOVING all your reactions. KEEP ‘EM COMING.
I’m also now picturing Fisk and Toady arguing about what constitutes art https://youtu.be/zYJ9cjQpM5g
Oh and if there’s a direct way to send you missives let me know, if you like.
You either DM me on Twitter (username is the same as my twitter handle) or email me at ppyajunebug at gmail dot com. Or keep replying here, whatever floats your boat!
Cool, thanks!
Fisk is so uncomfortably maladjusted. I’m hoping, possibly in vain, that I don’t have to see him on any more dinner dates with Superman’s mother.
And Matt is not any better. Nor any better than *I* am. “Shut up and kiss her!”
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I was once teased as being frigid, so POLITE was I.
Plug for best AU of all time, actually, no hyperbole: The Steinway!Verse Inception AU by toomuchplor: https://archiveofourown.org/series/6054
Arthur is a freshman concert pianist just arrived at school in Boston. Eames is a lyric baritone. So much opera. So many lieder. FEELINGS.
Thanks to that series I can’t ever hear “Erlkönig” without thinking “…like a hyperactive toddler set loose on a keyboard.”
I love AUs.
I don’t read a ton of fanfic but I love when the rivalry between characters is expressed in a Battle of the Bands, or Lizzy Bennet and Mr. Darcy discover they’re drift compatible, or life-and-death battles for kingship are high school student body president elections.
Mostly I like them because they’re fun, but I think it’s also worth thinking about how much of character, real or fictional, is reliant on external events. Pride and Prejudice is a great example because there’s so many modern interpretations (Bride & Prejudice, Lizzy Bennet diaries) and also because within the novel you can easily compare Charlotte Lucas to Lizzy Bennet, or Georgiana Darcy to Lydia Bennet, whose different personalities lead them to radically different conclusions despite facing similar circumstances.
Wait. I need to read this fic where Lizzy and Darcy are drift compatible, if that is a thing that exists irl. That is completely up my alley.
I don’t know if there’s actually a fic, but there are these photosets!
1
2
(also, while I normally hate editing notes in the comments section, there’s a large quote repeated twice in the first page: “much more apt to set something within a fandom and tweak canon ever so slightly to allow, say, Coulson and Clint Barton to have some alone time. When I have done AU, it’s been high school and college stories, simply because it’s a lot of fun to write from a teenage perspective.”)
http://jl8comic.tumblr.com/post/77716961078/jl8-1…
Too Real.
Thank you for reminding me I need to read those Hawkeye trades my friend gave me.
Also that probably means Jim Jarmusch makes Jane Austen movies.
Toasts, can we have an AU where Chris Evans and Renner did not say that thing about Natasha?
uggggghhh yes pleaseandthankyou
I shouldn’t be so disappointed and surprised yet here I remain SURPRISED AND DISAPPOINTED.
I am frankly unsurprised by Renner but totally surprised by Evans. His overly-involved feminist momma raised him better (we were led to believe)!
Oh totally agreed. EVANS!!!!!
At least they both issued apologies?
Blargh. Total “your fave is problematic” day.
Evans issued an apology. Renner issued a word turd.
YES. And then Natasha singlehandedly dismantles patriarchy. (I was wishing for this out loud to some friends today.)
One of the most inspiring things I’ve ever read on tumblr: “Be the coffee shop AU you wish to see in the world.”
Awesome points Sulagna. I’ll forward the link…
Important question: are there Aubreyad AUs? I would do illegal things for an Aubrey-Maturin AU of, like, anything. Avengers Aubreyad!AU, Pacific Rim Aubreyad!AU. I don’t care, just an Aubreyad!AU.
Oh man, Aubreyad AUs are so wonderful, but they’re so hard to find. Have you already read Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series? It starts out as basically an Aubreyad AU wherein Stephen Maturin is a baby dragon instead of a spy/surgeon. The first book is His Majesty’s Dragon.
Astolat has written a few AUs about Aubrey and Maturin, including one in space. I’m not aware of any fics for other fandoms set in the Aubrey-Maturin universe, though there are a handful of crossovers between the Aubreyad and other things that are already set during the Age of Sail.
Dissenting opinion: I do not much care for AU stuff.* For me, the purpose of fanfic is to explore the blank spaces of canon, as it were – to fill in the gaps of the story with stuff that is both pleasing and believable within the original framework. Because AU completely strips the context of the original story, I have a hard time seeing the point. Why not just create completely original fiction?
* With the exception of absurdist comics, like the Batman one featured.
This is a really interesting perspective! (That sounded sarcastic. It wasn’t.) Personally, as someone who reads a fair share of fanfic, I would say that most of the writers I return to began with canon then branched out from there. By that point in their writing, a reader is familiar enough with their interpretations of their favored casts of characters to recognize that author’s tropes, and it can be really fun to see those in an outside-of-canon/AU context.
Yeah, on one level I can understand the desire to see how our beloved characters would act in a completely new context. But in my brain such thought exercises are so silly that they’re best fit to one-off comics and memes that play up the goofiness quotient. So like I am ALL ABOUT the Marvel Nine Nine memes, even though I’ve never seen an episode of Brooklyn Nine Nine in my life, and have only vaguely even heard of it. But for more extended and/or serious fics I prefer keeping it in the original universe.
there can be a fine line between creating an AU and original fic. i’m writing some fairly fluffy AUs as well as some heavier stuff that fits canon’s gaps — it’s much quicker and more relaxing to write a story with characters you’re already familiar with, and you don’t have to spend so much time setting them up. it’s fun, and it’s easier to find a readership, and it’s also a good way to find something you want to read. if there’s a romantic pairing you like — and you particularly like their dynamic — you can hopefully find some good long stories about characters with that dynamic in various settings.
i also both read & write longer, less fluffy AUs. it can be fun to explore ways that these characters could have come to be — in ways that are different to canon. and to reinterpret them. and to mix elements of the canon with a new world that you’re creating.
i think it largely comes down to community, honestly.
The feature pic on this made me realize that I have no idea who is in Pacific Rim other than Rinko Kikuchi. (I have still not seen it.)
I don’t like people hyping me and I don’t respond well to it, but if the above sounds at all interesting to you then I’d recommend it. Oh and Idris Elba is in it, Idrising all OVER the damn place, in a restrained-cause-that’s-the-burden-of-command way. Oh and a sort of double act of Charlie Day and freaky-ass Burn Gorman (being really lovable actually) (he really is an odd looking man).
And yeah, frighteningly attractive Rinko Kikuchi is in it, with a plaintive but determined story.
I mean, the main reason I haven’t seen it is just because it’s not on Netflix up here, but I am VERY DISAPPOINTED in myself for forgetting Idris himself is in it.
Oh, okay, a region problem. Well, I hope you enjoy it, and I won’t blame you if you find a torrent.
The feature pic on this made me realize that I have no idea who is in Pacific Rim other than Rinko Kikuchi. (I have still not seen it.)
I don't like people hyping me and I don't respond well to it, but if the above sounds at all interesting to you then I'd recommend it. Oh and Idris Elba is in it, Idrising all OVER the damn place, in a restrained-cause-that's-the-burden-of-command way. Oh and a sort of double act of Charlie Day and freaky-ass Burn Gorman (being really lovable actually) (he really is an odd looking man).
And yeah, frighteningly attractive Rinko Kikuchi is in it, with a plaintive but determined story.
I am commenting even though I am not a big reader or writer in any fandom, just because I need to say how much I love this post and the previous. Really appreciate your thoughts and connections on this.
I guess I have a fandom story to tell. I follow an editor at a small press whose feed is like 20% publishing stuff (why I followed), 20% bizarre internet stuff, and 60% Supernatural fandom stuff. I’ve never seen the show and don’t care to. At first, I did not even find either of the characters in her ship remotely attractive or interesting.
But over time! Eventually, I looked forward to the pics! I started to develop a crush on one of the characters! And just today I actually unmuted and watched a video of the show that had been recut to look like a gritty cop movie. And I enjoyed it. But I see that what I am enjoying is the character arcs made satisfying, universe made logical, and chemistry made palpable as reimagined by fandom.
“We’re all stories in the end. Just make it a good one.”
"Time to stop taking a beating and start giving one."
<img src="http://www.jaynagyphoto.com/Verklempt.png">
Girl, it is all TOO much.
I'll let you know. And thanks for being around for my sudden unpacking of realizing what a fanboy my dad was at heart, even if it didn't look like it then, and how much we're even MORE alike.
Plus I'm getting a total Sean Connery Jimmy Malone/Ramirez vibe off Stick.
What are you prepared to do? And THEN what are you prepared to do?
This song is strangely fitting even if it's not its intention. https://youtu.be/ZWOuj_bkNRc
I'm also now picturing Fisk and Toady arguing about what constitutes art https://youtu.be/zYJ9cjQpM5g
Oh and if there's a direct way to send you missives let me know, if you like.
Cool, thanks!
Fisk is so uncomfortably maladjusted. I'm hoping, possibly in vain, that I don't have to see him on any more dinner dates with Superman's mother.
And Matt is not any better. Nor any better than *I* am. "Shut up and kiss her!"
<img src="http://www.jaynagyphoto.com/DD11.png"/> I was once teased as being frigid, so POLITE was I.