#just to work at a gym. I think they should’ve been raised in a pseudo-catholic death cult and harrow should be an ecoterrorist | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

meat-loving-meat · 7 months ago

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I’m thinking about Modern!AUs in fanfiction and why sometimes they’re some of my favorite fics and also sometimes the Worst™️. (<-that is a joke. There is no such thing as bad fanfiction, just fanfiction I don’t personally like.)

Because I LOVE Modern!AUs that ask interesting questions about how the setting of a story impacts the characters—how much of the setting can you remove while still being able to recognize the characters in question? All of it? None of it? What new problems would living in a world with planes and phones create for these characters? How are the social and political tensions of the original canon reflected in our own world?

The “problem” (again, not an actual problem, just a personal preference) is that most Modern!AUs COMPLETELY refuse to engage with any of that. They instead become a stale rehashing of the original canon except with lower stakes. Nothing about the modern setting adds interest, and everything interesting from the original setting falls away.

I think that a lot of people write Modern!AU fics to deescalate the conflict of the original canon and give the characters more relatable problems, which isn’t universally terrible, but it can so easily become boring. I don’t WANT to know what it would be like if one of these characters was a florist and the other was a tattoo artist; I want to know what would happen if you gave one of them a gun.

#yes this is about my Vanyel nuclear weapons AU. IMO Vanyel as a character should be doomed to be a living weapon no matter the setting #This is also about the locked tomb #my good friend harrowhark nonagesimus didn’t give herself a lobotomy to end up working at hot topic #and gideon didn’t throw herself on a fencepost with the full understanding that her soul would be consumed in the fires of lyctorhood #just to work at a gym. I think they should’ve been raised in a pseudo-catholic death cult and harrow should be an ecoterrorist #This is also why I think tgcf modern!AUs leave me a little flat. Like Xie Lian is SO WEIRD because he willingly submitted to #getting stabbed a hundred times. He also got buried alive. There is simply no modern!AU explanation for how weird he is!!!#(<-says the person who has a tgcf modern!au posted on his ao3)#On the flip side this is also why I think MDZS modern AUs kind of work??#because SO MANY of the problems MDZS characters have are just.#‘my dad likes my adoptive brother more than me’#‘my family doesn’t want me associating with this person who has a bad reputation’#so at least like the front half of MDZS is modern!AU-able #people lose me when they try to make a modern analogue for the genocide of the Wen. like oooookay #I don’t think getting their company shut down should be presented as equivalent to a genocide but w/ever #I do not like it therefore I shall not read it

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