#also: aww it's always nice when people remember my name! i obviously don't mind 'Anghraine' at all but i do appreciate being Elizabeth'd :)

[anghraine]

Happy New Year Elizabeth! Hope the holidays are treating you well :) I just discovered Jane Austen Variations (or rather, Google Cards just recommended it to me) and so I was wondering if you had any thoughts on it?

Happy New Year, anon! They are now that the string of Christmas obligations are over and I'm back in my proper urban environment :)

I'm not sure if "Jane Austen Variations" means something more specific here than the usage I'm familiar with (I don't know anything about Google Cards). I've only encountered the term as a marketing euphemism for "published Jane Austen fanfic" (often AU, almost always P&P-based) used mainly by people who write or read a bunch of it. I do have opinions on that, though!

The "Variations" fic, as far as I've seen, has no more connection to Austen's work than random P&P fic on AO3, though sometimes smoother grammar. The better ones tend to read like solid Regency romances with P&P characters+occasional cameos from other Austen characters, and sometimes inherit major plot points from P&P like a Hunsford proposal scene, but still feel very much more like "Regency historicals" than anything else.

The real difference between Variations and run of the mill online P&P fanfic is that it's legal to sell P&P fanfic, with the bonus that Austen has a good-sized, active, modern fandom with enough money to make publishing fanfic potentially worth the trouble. However, the money element tends to change the fandom dynamics in a way I dislike, at least when P&P fics get pulled from where they were originally posted to add to the already glutted and kitschy Jane Austen industry (this is in no way a slight at Austen herself, whose work remains my #1 hyperfixation of choice and favorite author, but the industry around the pop culture idea of her makes Shakespeare's look restrained).

There are (alleged) writers who use genAI to churn out reams of bland slop that also gets lumped into the "Jane Austen Variations" stuff, for instance. There's been even more direct plagiarism to make a quick buck on Amazon (my P&P fics have been directly plagiarized multiple times this way, even though all of my fic is and has always been freely available online). That's not most of it, to be fair, but I haven't found "Variations" fic to be better or deeper or more connected with Austen, and I don't really have that much to do with that side of fandom any more. And I do feel a bit ... well, you know the people who are like "stop being pretentious, it's not chartreuse, it's fucking green"? I don't care about color terminology, but it's very much how I feel about the whole Not Like The Other Fanfic Writers "Jane Austen Variations" branding.