#agathario canon in every universe

[scripted-borscht]

“Sorry. Not my type.”

“Cosmic is just my size.”

AgathaRio is canon in every Universe

[sapphoshands]

it’s shocking why the great majority of authors in this fandom who are mostly agathario shippers don’t write agatha harkness going through history fucking other women or even fucking rio and leaving her and instead write aus where they can easily be happy. flabbergasting. i actually don’t even particularly like mundane aus and i would love if there was more fics set in canon with a happy ending but they are far harder to write so i don’t pretend that i don’t get it why one is much more popular than the other because i didn’t just discover fandom

see, but despite your implications, i don't actually think it's a skill issue! there are certainly well-written au fics out there!

but what you say about just wanting a happy ending is interesting, and i guess comes back to the dichotomy i see between 'wanting to think about women with the actors' faces' and 'wanting to engage with the canon and the characters.' which is not to say that i can't think of a dozen ideas right now for agatha/rio stories with happy endings within canon, including but not limited to the classic-for-a-reason fix-it fic (some of which i have seen, to be clear).

certainly the academic work that has been done on the coffee shop au - much of which i am assuming to be broadly generalisable - emphasises the pleasures of mundanity and repetition while questioning the lack of conflict or difficulty. and certainly questions of ic versus ooc have long plagued the au genre. but i feel like there used to be a lot more of a mix basically regardless of fandom, like au used to be a fallback once more of the in-universe stories were told, and now i see a huge push right from the off and it fascinates me.

and it especially fascinates me in this fandom because to me, so much of what makes the characters, and so much of what makes the characters interesting, is the complexity and drama of their dynamic. and the rush to erase that is surprising. i'm not trying to be disingenuous. i just think that canon in this case gives so many opportunities for so many different kinds of stories that it blows my mind the ratio of canon to au is what it is. noted grifter agatha harkness has probably done a little of every possible profession out there! gimme that sweet sweet character study!

but this is also the fandom where one of the biggest fics is ai-generated, so maybe it's not that deep.

(sorry, did you not expect me to take this ask seriously? because i'm genuinely interested in what seems to me to be a big change relatively recently, based on more than a quarter-century in fandom.)

[littledata]

I'm writing every AU that ever existed.

(Okay, maybe not every AU. But "I'm going to write a lot of AUs" isn't a very catchy title.)

I love AUs and I want to write a lot of them. Some of them might be long, some of them might be short, who knows, this is a made up challenge with made up rules. I'll track what I've written on this post so I know when I've written Every AU That Ever Existed [citation needed].

Angel/Demon

Band

Bodyguard - agathario, oct 2024

Body swap

Canon divergent - agathario, nov 2024

Chef/cooking

Childhood friends

Classic Romantic Comedy Movie Plot

Coffee shop - avatrice, sep 2023

College - avatrice, oct 2023

Crime

Detective

Enemies to lovers

Epistolary

Fairies/Magic

Fake dating

Fame

Family - avatrice, may 2024

Fantasy

Historical

Horse Girl

Medical

Mythology

Ocean based

Post-apocalyptic

Road trip - avatrice, apr 2024

Role Swap

Roommates/neighbours - avatrice, dec 2023

Royalty

Science fiction/Cyberpunk

Soulmate

Spies/secret agents

Spooky scary - avatrice, nov 2023

Sports

Stranded/isolated

Superpowers

Tattoo artist/florist

Time travel

Universal classic monsters

Weird

Western

Workplace