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Snowflake Day 10

Day 10
In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (Or a few!) Tell us what makes it work for you, and why it appeals to you so much. Talk about what you like to see in fanworks featuring that theme most. Feel free to include recs and examples!
Does Gen count? Gen feels like it should count, because it’s always a small minority of fic, but I suppose it’s more of a genre than a trope. Note to self: dig out that ‘Hardcore Genficcer’ icon.
My first instinct was "telepathy!" as that’s my favourite thing to write, but because I have such strong feelings about it, it’s not always my favourite thing to read. I think that would have to be AUs, especially fusions of one fandom with another. As someone with very little ability to write outside canon, I’m always fascinated by how writers take one detail and go off in a totally plausible but utterly different direction. And I love the cleverness of fusing one fandom with another, picking elements of each and crafting something new. It’s something I’m trying write at the moment, and man it’s difficult. It’s that cleverness that draws me in, the moment where there’s a detail in this AU world that is a damned clever take on the original one, and it just makes me grin from ear to ear.
One of my favourites is an old one, a Merlin/Firefly fusion, We are Stardust which I like because it does more than just take characters from one fandom and dump them in another. It takes elements of both and blends them into a seamless whole, and it’s the perfect length to give you enough and leave you wanting more.
There’s also Kianspo’s Let us Dare, which turns the world of Merlin on its head, with humour and warmth. I would have watched the hell out of this show, I really would.
SGA, like Merlin, spawned about three million AUs a week, but the one that sticks in my head is Greyias’ See No Evil. I loved how it kept Rodney and John perfectly in character, while changing their roles utterly. It’s a long, satisfying read. And I was just talking to Naye and Sholio about A Clear and Different Light, which is a stunningly complete AU with talking whales. Tell me, who doesn’t want talking whales in their fic?
More recently, I loved Lady Ragnell’s Hold me close and fear me not, which is a Daredevil/Fairy Tale* fusion. I like how it feels like it’s set in a world just a side-step from our own, and how the magical elements have their own logic.
Please do rec me your own favourite AUs!
*I’d heard of, but wasn’t familiar with the story of Tam Lin before reading the fic, and it really, really didn’t matter.
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Oh yeah, if the fandom is magical I will BALK at no magic. Or no creatures or whatever. Those are usually the fandoms where I'm the most "NO FULL AUS PLEASE" about. Teen Wolf without werewolves! Harry Potter without magic! I'll take Merlin modern AUs without magic but I love when secretly Merlin is magic anyway. Daemons are eh. I read like 5% of those for the fandoms/pairings I'm interested in, usually if I trust the writer. But it's not like I was THAT into the HDM universe.
And yeah, that's exactly what I mean. Sometimes people try too hard to keep certain plot elements without thinking about how these characters would not do that and it becomes a farce. I was reading a Merlin fusion like that a while back and your post put me in mind of it, ha. I've read a lot of good ones.
no subject
Gen is one of those things that comes up in the cycle of fannish discussion from time to time. I think it's very much in the eye of the beholder! For me, it basically means "any fic where romance is not the point." And I'll get thrown out of stories that are labelled as Gen because there's nothing explicit, but are essentially romances. Like finding the right AU for you, you know it when you see it ;D
It's funny you saying that about fusion fics. One of the reasons I realised mine wasn't working back in November was that I was letting the plot guide the story instead of the characters. This has been a good reminder that the point is to put characters from one world into another, not necessarily to slavishly follow the plot of one canon using characters from another. If the canon is good, that won't work, because it will have been driven by the original characters! (I think that made more sense in my head, but hopefully you see what I mean) I have to go back to the drawing board and work out how the Daredevil characters would have been affected by living in the Guardians of the Galaxy universe, and take it from there. Maybe I'll reread We are Stardust for inspiration :D
no subject
Yeah, that's what I think of as gen as well. There can be relationships in it, especially established, but they need to be a byproduct of the story rather than the focus. I was just curious as to your preferences because sure, in fanfic, you get SO much romance that gen is its own thing, but it's such a massively large category when you think about mainstream media. Like the thing I'm good at but don't like reading is character studies, and I wrote that one Pretty Little Liars canon-divergence AU where there were vampires and that explained everything, and I LOVE reading team/group dynamics gen... there's just so much.
You are doing The Good Work.