Meta Month, Day 28: More thoughts on AUs

[mark_asphodel]

This is kind of a follow-up to some musings on AUs over at amielleon’s journal (locked post).  AUs are great fun, after all... and greatly frustrating.  To keep it simple, we'll just look at AU adaptations of individual games or gameverses, not mash-ups/crossovers.

 

Ammie was talking about world-transposing AUs-- the different kinds and the pitfalls thereof.  On the other hand, how about AUs that instead extract a key theme or concept from the canon and run with that, tailoring everything to fit the theme?  I guess this sort of AU might run into the “fridge magnet poetry” kind of world-transposition AU that Ammie identified, except the amount of game material that gets shaved away in the course of the adaptation makes it something other than world transposition, IMO.

For example, take my failed NaNo project from last year:  the FE3/12 War of Heroes storyline recast as a modern day corporate takeover drama, focusing on the themes of loyalty and betrayal, and cutting all the religious elements out entirely.  No magic.  No dragons.  No endgame with Gharnef and the captive women.  Just a straight-out political struggle for dominance, with no room for two winners.  It follows the plot, or at least the initial, surface plotline.  The bulk of the characters have their roles to play.  But without the spiritual dimension to Marth’s victory over Hardin (and Gharnef, Medeus, etc), the meaning of the whole piece shifts.  Hardin putting a revolver to his own temple in the CEO suite of ARC Industries sort of captures the idea of the Dark Emperor standing at the throne in his ruined palace, daring Marth to come and kill him... but not quite.

 

Or, you could take a facet of the spiritual aspect to the War of Heroes and run that.  Strip it down to that confrontation between Marth and Hardin, with Hardin as a hard-driving political reformer, and Marth as the charismatic preacher-boy (think Eli Sunday without the malice) who first bolsters and then frustrates Hardin's ambitions. You could set it in an early 20th century milieu of city bosses, Prohibition advocates, and radio... or a 1980s atmosphere of Wall Street, Iran-Contra, and televangelists.  Or Renaissance Florence.  Or 1750s England.  Or...  

A core component of FE3/12, the affection and trust and shared sense of purpose gone horribly wrong, would be there, and the “magic” might even be there too, in a way, but maybe some other things wouldn’t.  Like pilgrimages to the Ice Temple to retrieve sleeping princesses.  Or massive armies sacking entire countries.  Instead of a full-scale war, you would end up with a more intimate kind of struggle-- There Will Be Blood, with or without the bowling alley brawl as its denouement.

[Ten to one, the bulk of the readers would end up sympathizing with Hardin.  Especially if his actual wartime atrocities don’t end up so atrocious in translation.  Then again, often a single murder can alienate readers more than the wrecking of an entire nation.]

Or focus on something else and make that the core of the AU: the human plight of the Grust kiddies and the inner conflict of their supporters.  The “failed state” theme that surfaces again and again in the War of Shadows.  Or the deeper thread running under it all, the folly and corruptible nature of humanity-- which arguably gets as close as you can to the genuine core of the storyline (especially wrt FE12).  All of these are true to the source material.  None of these are the exact story we get in the games.  But why do we want that exact story when we already have the games (in some fashion)?

And you can do the same for any of the other games, too-- the “obsession” angle in FE8, or the “failed heroes” motif in FE4.  Grounding an AU in one aspect of a game and doing it successfully may well make for a better story than trying to transpose the entire game, lock-stock-and-barrel, and making a partial success of it.  And someone may squawk because you omitted their favorite character or prevented their OTP from happening, but hey-- there’s always another AU to write.  Right?  Write.

Comments

[hooves.livejournal.com]

I agree there should be balance, but where is that balance? Obviously you can't make Lyon or even Eirika or Valter the same exact person they are in the games. You can make the similar enough to please the fans (for the most part), but you can't ever make them a carbon-copy. It doesn't work that way.

Though I think I like AU fics for the sole reason that the struggles in an AU are usually...small, intimate. Not on a global scale-- teenagers saving the world.

I'd love to see an AU fic where, say, teenage FE characters have to overcome something major on their own-- but it doesn't have to be global anything. For all I care it can be a teenage pregnancy. (Just an example.) It's certainly not global, but to a group of teenagers it might FEEL global.

^I mean, if we're going with teenage heroes again.

But then again, making, say, Serra or L'Arachel into mid 30s adults issssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss against canon and it's AU so I can safely say that a mid-30s AU L'Arachel is not going to be like the one in the games. In fact. They shouldn't be imo. Not in a modern AU. None of the cast, particularly the main cast, should feel exactly the same. Or there's something wrong.

I mean, Lyn can be all ragey over some drunk guy in a semi kersplatting her parents but he's going to jail or prison or some shit, and it's not like she's going to contemplate murdalizing him when he gets out. (Because it'd be a while? Because it's illegal? Well duh.) That strips part of her character away either way: you have to choose: is she going to be amazingly full with the desire to get revenge and try to kill the guy, which goes against all the rest of her character?

I mean, there aren't exactly modern-day equivalents to bandits destroying an entire settlement of people unless you wanna go back to the 1800s and do Cowboys vs. Indians stuff. But that's not exactly modern, you know? And a drunk guy running over her parents isn't even REMOTELY like seeing them be mercilessly slaughtered along with only God knows how many other people.

But we have to also make allowences for modern-day bringing up. Death was a big deal to Lyn, definitely. I mean, in the canon. But she lives in a medieval fantasy world where death happens, bandits do kill people for trinkets (or for fun), and murder plans are just hush-hush among the villagefolk but all plans are totally out in the open-- just, nobody chooses to act on stopping them.

They way her people and, especially, parents, died had a big impact on canon Lyndis. But on a modern-day person? It'd probably traumatize the fuck out of them.

[kyusil.livejournal.com]

Though I think I like AU fics for the sole reason that the struggles in an AU are usually...small, intimate.

I think this is very true. My favorite AU fic and one of my favorite FE stories in general (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7215075/1/Consolation_Prize) did this seamlessly: not performing a cast transplant, but building the world around the perspective of one character and her personal struggles. It felt wonderfully real, both to Florina and to the world the story created, and it managed to hook me even though I'm rather lukewarm towards these two characters. I didn't need a grand struggle to care about what happened, but the story didn't feel pointless, either.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, "Consolation Prize" is phenomenal. But it pretty much took the approach I'm advocating above-- the author isolated one thing to focus on, and stripped away everything that didn't accomplish that goal. The small-scale drama worked because the focus was razor-sharp. There was absolutely nothing unnecessary in that story. Florina's personal struggles felt real in part because there was nothing to dilute them, or distract the reader from them.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

though I think I like AU fics for the sole reason that the struggles in an AU are usually...small, intimate.

Those can work really well-- I'm glad Kyusil linked to "Consolation Prize," because I was trying to remember that story as the sole example I've seen of a modern AU that worked completely. Though I did like a lot of what you did in... that story where Lyn was raising Sue as a single mom? There were some really vivid parts in it, like the birthday party scene. Kinda felt Rath got the Innes treatment there, though.

I think a pitfall of many modern AUs is that they don't have that kind of tight focus seen in "Consolation Prize," or they start out with focus but then lose it. And then you either have something that's trying to follow the canonical plot and failing because the pieces don't fit, or something ditches the plot but ends up losing the sense of whatever struggle there was-- personal, interpersonal, or otherwise. And since there's not the canonical anchor points to fall back on, the story kind of goes off a cliff, Wile E Coyote style..

Canonical anchor points, after all, being a big part of what makes fanfiction, well, fanfic.

[hooves.livejournal.com]

Kinda felt Rath got the Innes treatment there, though.

Yeah, I never got to explain what happened at all in that one. Never got far enough. I assure you, though. He's not a bad sort of guy in it. It was just one of those relationships that ended up not working out.

At least that was my intent but I haven't read it in so long I don't remember what I actually wrote. >_>

Good point though, re: canonical anchor points. Or any anchor points. And focus. I mean, I think a lot of them end up as pair the spares, or a better example: Let's Include Everyone. Where it's fairly likely in an, idk, FE8 AU, that all of the characters who see each other and get to know one another, might not do so in an AU. Having Lyon already know the twins? Makes sense. Having the twins know THE ENTIRE CAST? ...Eh. That makes a huge cast to play with, and it doesn't work very well in a modern setting imo.