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I want you all to know that you're driving me crazy. Except, of course, for those of you who aren't. And probably most of the people driving me crazy aren't reading this.
See?
Yes. Well. I have always used the term AU to indicate that at some point in my fanfic, I (or whoever) wandered away from canon on purpose.
Now, apparently there is an effort to classify this sort of thing more specifically. Mostly in HPfic, but I've seen it in at least one OTL post as well. In one place, we have someone maintaining that an AU refers strictly to a story in which there is a well-defined point at which an event went differently and the story explores the consequences. In another, we have a discussion of how Alternate Universe and Alternate Reality are different, and one means altering an event and going from there and the other means setting everything up with a whole different set of assumptions, such as planting the characters in a different century or a world with entirely different rules. Oh, and how at least one person held the view that these definitions belonged with the opposite terms from the way the first person articulating them thought.
The OTL post had an already-in-progress story going from one classification to the other when Ultimate X-Men introduced characters the ficcer had already brought in.
And then there are the "Well, all fanfic is really AU" people, who have a point on one level but on another are apparently trying to render the term even more uninformative than it already is.
When this got discussed a while back in comicfic, I think there was at least some movement to classify AUs as What If..? stories (like when Marvel does a spinoff issue asking What If somethingorother had gone differently) or Elseworlds stories (like when DC does a story about characters in a completely different setting) if people felt it necessary. Somehow I doubt I'd have much luck introducing that to HPficcers.
And then there's "Alternate Timeline," which I have sometimes tried adopting in a possibly hopeless effort to clear things up, but that might only work where the source material actually admits the existence of multiple timelines in the first place.
See?
Yes. Well. I have always used the term AU to indicate that at some point in my fanfic, I (or whoever) wandered away from canon on purpose.
Now, apparently there is an effort to classify this sort of thing more specifically. Mostly in HPfic, but I've seen it in at least one OTL post as well. In one place, we have someone maintaining that an AU refers strictly to a story in which there is a well-defined point at which an event went differently and the story explores the consequences. In another, we have a discussion of how Alternate Universe and Alternate Reality are different, and one means altering an event and going from there and the other means setting everything up with a whole different set of assumptions, such as planting the characters in a different century or a world with entirely different rules. Oh, and how at least one person held the view that these definitions belonged with the opposite terms from the way the first person articulating them thought.
The OTL post had an already-in-progress story going from one classification to the other when Ultimate X-Men introduced characters the ficcer had already brought in.
And then there are the "Well, all fanfic is really AU" people, who have a point on one level but on another are apparently trying to render the term even more uninformative than it already is.
When this got discussed a while back in comicfic, I think there was at least some movement to classify AUs as What If..? stories (like when Marvel does a spinoff issue asking What If somethingorother had gone differently) or Elseworlds stories (like when DC does a story about characters in a completely different setting) if people felt it necessary. Somehow I doubt I'd have much luck introducing that to HPficcers.
And then there's "Alternate Timeline," which I have sometimes tried adopting in a possibly hopeless effort to clear things up, but that might only work where the source material actually admits the existence of multiple timelines in the first place.
