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

[writerawakened.livejournal.com]

I partially agree with this, but at the same time, if you put 40 people in a modern-day AU and have a global scale catastrophe strike... It's still not the same. And probably not very believable, either.

Well, if you think about it, even in the setting of FE, where armies regularly got into the tens of thousands, 40-50 normal people themselves wouldn't be able to swing the momentum completely. I think we're supposed to just accept that our characters are more powerful and more "mythic" than the "Average person." They might not be privy to the world leader's decisions as to grand strategy but if you suited up 50 FE chars for modern combat I think they'd have a similar impact on the outcome just on merit of being, well, FE chars XD

But it doesn't necessarily have to be something as large as a world war, IMO. Mark's examples of business and political conflicts are good ones, and also the plot of most thriller flicks released in the last 10 or 20 years where the heroes take on gangs, or domestic terrorists, or runaway trains. It just has to be a situation where something is at stake. For example, say there was an AU where our heroes have to save a group of ten hostages; it may not be the same as a war where hundreds of thousands of people die, but it's still a pretty big deal and a big source of conflict.

[hooves.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it, I wish I was good at writing crime/drama because those kinds of things would be exciting to write and read about.

^I don't like "hurr durr let's kill people off for cheap entertainment" kind of stuff, but I do like suspense, which crime dramas usually have. :D

So an AU where heroes are saving hostages? I would be reading it, I think. The bonus to this sort of thing is there might not be any room for romance. And holy shit are we lacking true genfic. :P