komadori | Fandom Snowflake Challenge: Day 14

Day 14

In your own space, share your love for something fannish: a trope, cliché, kink, motif, theme, format, or fandom.

Is fanart about the Avengers being fluffy and domestic your jam? Are tentacle fics your thing? How about podfics that have characters talking dirty? Is
your Pinterest filled with images of knitted fanart? Make a post about it! Squee to your heart's content, tell us why you love it, gives us some examples.

Then, leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. You might be surprised to find out
that other people are head over heels about those things too. :D

I had to look through a few of the other posts, but I finally feel like I have an answer: AUs.

I haven't read as much of them as I would like to say, but I love the idea of wondering "what if" or putting our beloved characters in different situations. How would they react if this, this, and this were different? If you're not happy with canon, fix it. If you are happy with canon, imagine how it would be if it had gone in a different direction. I love any kind of AU--no matter how far they deviate from the source material. Sure, there are some fandoms where I'd rather see something set in canon, but for the most part, I enjoy the chance to see what kinds of new situations and worlds the characters can inhabit. This is probably one of the tropes I've loved the longest because I would always love to let my childish imagination wonder what would happen next or how the story would be different if something else had happened.

I think what really got me interested in AUs was the Phantom of the Opera modern retellings, especially those of Quiet2885. There really is not enough time in canon to squeeze in too much fic. You could set it before Raoul appears, but Christine doesn't meet Erik face-to-face (or, in this case, face-to-mask) until after that. If you are an Erik/Christine shipper at all, you need to make it an AU because no matter how much Love Never Dies wants to tell us otherwise, they do not end up together. That's not even taking into consideration the original Leroux novel. When All is Lost is the longest fic I've ever read, and it is pure AU. Although I haven't read it in about five years, I remember loving it to bits at the time.