#there are fantasy AU fics where they're both dragons but they're personally less interesting to me

[alectoperdita]

anyway here are the kaijou fics i know of that feature discussion and/or use of fantasy dildos modeled after dragon dicks

In League With Dragons by saggiclowns

Bad Dragon, Good Puppy by HornedQueenOfHell

Pearly White and Silver, with Hints of Blue by KyattoShaku

Bad Dragon by @unfriendlyamazon

[theimaginatrix27]

My Personal Approach to Fantasy AUs

I have received a number of comments on my Deep Space 9 Fairy Tale AU, Seven for a Secret, to the effect of "I love how you've kept everyone so in-character!"

I also recently sent a friend part of the first chapter of a prequel fic in the same setting, and they said they're not usually interested in AUs of this nature, because too often, they've seen characters written in ways that make them less recognisably themselves. But they did like my writing.

So I'm going to try and explain my process in a way that hopefully makes sense to everyone reading it. I'm absolutely not making this post to gatekeep fanfic, or to tell someone how to write their story, I'm just explaining what I do when writing a Fantasy AU within a fandom context.

For clarity, this post is about AUs where the characters were born into a high/epic/secondary world fantasy setting (I have heard all these terms before). It is not about charas being isekaied into fantasy settings for crossover purposes (that genre encompasses portal fantasy, doesn't have to involve the charas dying), though tbh I love those, too. Excellent fun. But the characters in those cases are still the canon ones, just being put in a situation. I actually plan on writing a series of DND campaign fics with the casts of my three favourite classic Trek series that are basically this premise, but that's not what I want to talk about today.

In a lot of cases, when someone has written a fantasy AU, the characters are changed so much that you could, theoretically, file off the serial numbers, switch out canon references and turn it into an original novel. This is also not strictly a bad thing—I've done it myself, and although that story never got finished, it paved the way for those that followed, so it's helpful in the creative process to recognise when you have enough material for an original spin on something.

However, for me especially, it is more fun to see and recognise the fandom characters, and then watch them navigate a story that is both unique and would not be the same without them.

Presenting Exhibit A: The Princess and the Dragon, a fanfiction for Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, written by my dear friend, @kohakuhime

This was one of the first fics of this nature that I came across in my wanderings through the blighted wastelands of FFN—Kohaku's fics were very much an oasis in the desert, so refreshing and vibrant were they, but this was her big fantasy baby, centred around a ship we both loved, and rich with lore and magic and mystery. It was also peppered with canon references, and all the characters were kept breathtakingly in-character—I won't get into spoiler territory, but let's just say I could hear the voice-actors saying so many of these lines, they were so good! My bar for this type of AU was set pretty high in large part because of this fic.

To be quite fair, Kohaku has said she could probably file off the serial numbers of TPATD, change some of the components of the magic system and release it as an original novel, as the concept itself (again, avoiding spoilers by going into details out of respect for this friend and her excellent story) is a fun twist on a particular trope. But although there are many original elements, it still feels like a Yu-Gi-Oh! fic, because of all the grounding points woven throughout, and how familiar the characters are.

This fic was not the only story I found that helped shape my approach back in 2012—there were a couple other fics in the Dragon Ball Z archive on FFN that also contributed, but they were both written a long time ago and I'm not sure they'd hold up nearly so well today. One of them was a fairy tale retelling (well, a Disney film retelling, but it was really good from my perspective as a fic newbie!), and this plus some other—shall we say, less interesting adaptations in the Yu-Gi-Oh fandom inspired me to write the fic now known as Wild Swans of Domino, which I'm not linking here because I am in the process of editing it up to my current standards. Seven for a Secret is, in its way, a spiritual successor to WSoD, though I do intend to finish the latter (and the sequels I developed over the years). WSoD was my practice ground for developing the approach I wrote this post to explain, and it kinda shows in the current version, because I started out simple, and then my brain started generating lore and places for more canon references to go and the story got away from me. That—happens to me a lot.

My approach with this type of AU comes down to one major point: If I am writing a fairy tale adaptation (it's usually a fairy tale adaptation that starts this for me), or some other fantasy story in an alternate universe which these characters are, for the purposes of the fic, native to, then both they and the setting must have some familiar aspects tying them back to the source material. The characters, especially, must still feel like themselves, or you may lose readers' interest, because "Benjamin Sisko wouldn't do that!" or "Seto Kaiba wouldn't react that way in this situation! Stop making him quote the movie's dialogue, it sounds so contrived it is painful to read!"

... Ahem, moving on from bad memories of bad fics.

WSoD and Secret are both based on a fairy tale I already have an original story idea for (several, actually), so I don't need or want either of them to be unique enough to divorce them from their fandom origins. Therefore, while developing them, I have done/am doing my utmost to weave in as many threads from canon as possible within the boundaries of the setting, and have also done my best to preserve the characters' personalities. And according to those aforementioned comments, I'm doing pretty well!

To be absolutely fair, in both cases, the fandoms in question are either another form of Fantasy or as close to Fantasy as a Sci-fi setting can get (Sisko's an honest to the Prophets Chosen one, for goodness sake!). But I do believe you can do this with any character, from any setting, if you put enough thought into it.

And maybe that's part of why I don't see it around as much, because some (often younger but not always) fic authors can have a concept float into their head or sent to them by another fan, and bang out a fic in a week that hits all the points they wanted it to without too much brainstorming behind it. Whereas I, a perfectionist and possesser of an increasingly plot-tribble-infested brain, can't make a single plot decision without pondering it for several days, and fret over little logistical details until I'm purple in the face (probably. I don't have eyeballs and thence can't look in a mirror). But I still think it's doable for any character.

To do this well, you must consider what fundamentally makes this character who they are. What traits would you absolutely have to keep (aside from physical appearance in most cases) to ensure this character was familiar to the reader who clicked on the fandom tag and subsequently your fic. If you ran across Sherlock Holmes in, say, the Pokémon world, how would you know he was Sherlock Holmes? Why, he'd be solving mysteries, and doing so by analysing all sorts of details, noticing things others failed to, putting pieces together that formed a solution others wouldn't have even considered, because the majority of those puzzle pieces were overlooked! And he'd probably be skulling shuckle juice when he didn't have a mystery to solve. And obviously he'd be autistic.

Are you imagining it? I hope you are. Now imagine a character, or several, from one of your fandoms, that you love. Imagine what you love best about them, what makes them who they are, from your perspective. Now imagine a setting that's different from their source material—there are any number of AUs you could pick. Now, think carefully about how you would write them in this setting, while focusing on changing as little about them as possible.

In Secret, Ben and Julian are both princes (this is revealed in Chapter 1, I don't mind telling you). The Dax symbiont is a Fae being magically bound to Jadzia, who is a mage. Their personalities are still familiar to the reader. Miles O'Brien has barely changed at all, because he doesn't need to.

And there's the single golden rule: When writing an AU like this, only change as much or as little as you absolutely need to for your story to work. You can, of course, have fun with how you change things—just check out Innate Conditions and its companion fics by @tokidokifish for a DS9 example (Cardassians are shapeshifting dragons! How cool is that?)

I hope all this makes sense. And again, this is not an attempt to dictate how you, personally, write your stories. I do hope you at least give it a little thought, though, if you haven't already. Most importantly, have fun!