Is it just me or has a lot of fandom forgotten what “AU” means? It’s short for Alternate Universe. I keep seeing people talking about, like, “fake dating AU” or “only one bed AU.” Unless your characters exist in a world where a) beds don’t exist or b) beds exist in such abundance there could not POSSIBLY be only one of them, that’s not an AU. It’s just a regular degular story.
Okay I truly expected this to get like 5 notes, what is happening. Anyway some of these tags are bonkers. “An AU describes anything that doesn’t happen in canon” bestie that’s what fic is. You’re literally describing fanfiction. Is there a huge category of fics that just summarize canon that I’m missing? What on earth is going on.
And for the “what about canon divergence” folks out there:
Fic where the Avengers are starship pilots or cowboys or, idk, cavemen or something <- THIS IS AN AU
Fic where Bucky becomes Captain America in the 1940s instead of Steve <- THIS IS ALSO AN AU, just the canon divergence kind
Fic where Sam and Bucky hook up during or after TFAWS <- not? an AU?? just because they didn’t film it???
“What about if it’s an AU where the Avengers are all giant slime creatures AND there’s only one bed, that’s an Only One Bed AU” bro c'mon.
agreed but this is the funniest possible example you could have used
so when I read the first two posts here, a part of me was fighting it the whole time
basically part of me was reading along like: “okay, yeah, AU means alternate universe… and yeah, all fanfic includes things that didn’t happen onscreen in canon… and AU is for things that, by the laws of the fictional universe, could not have happened in canon, even offscreen….
but… what is the point of saying this? Nobody’s been claiming otherwise, have they? what definition of AU is anyone using that doesn’t fit with OP’s analysis here”
and then I remembered how
(now that I’m writing for Tron)
(and now that I am interpreting certain scenes in Tron canon in ways vastly different from how the writers probably intended)
(like in “The Greatest Little Deresolution” where Ram did not actually die in the Recognizer, he just got so insanely horny off Flynn’s User-Power that the moment Flynn held his hands he came so hard he Bethesda-glitched through the floor and rebooted hours later in the canyon and then ran off to have a threesome with Tron and Yori)
(I mean. it’s not implausible! it even has support in canon-adjacent materials! like that early-draft script where the deleted scene implies that 1. programs express intimacy mainly through hand-touching and 2. their intimacy eventually has them dissolving into a sort of energy-cloud)
(and it doesn’t even throw off the thematic significance of Ram’s death in the story! because the thematic significance of the whole Recognizer scene is that Flynn is a completely oblivious doofus who has no idea what he’s doing in there, and yet succeeds through luck and maybe through the System understanding his importance as a User and automatically giving him what he wants)
(anyway, it is…. clearly not AU? it is just a different interpretation of what we see in canon?)
(BUT. thinking about it, i realize i have seen a few people use the term AU for that fic. and also at least a few of my other… unusual interpretations)
(and the last example up there? with Wimsey and the aliens. yeah. that is the same sorta thing, and that is what OP was talking about.)
…yeah they’re right.
I think I actually enjoy the challenge of writing a fic that doesn’t require it to be an AU, like, it doesn’t contradict anything the regular continuity, it just happens off screen, or before or after the story, no matter how outrageous it might seem. I guess part of it is because I grew up with the Star Wars “Expanded Universe”.
Heck, I almost don’t consider my “Alien vs. TRON” fic an AU, but more “this is set far off in the distant future, and doesn’t affect anything that happened in the canonical Tron storyline, so it *could* theoretically have happened in that universe.”
