there may be words

Challenge #3

In your own space, put some favorite characters into an AU, fuse some favorite canons together, talk about your favorite AU/fusion tropes, or tell us why AU/fusions aren’t your cup of tea. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Really, you might as well ask if the sun likes to rise. Admittedly much-earlier me used to do only the occasional canon-divergence back when I cared more about complying to canon, but these days literally anything goes. Pretty much the only kinds of AU concepts that I'm "eh" about are cases where the setting is overly specific in a way I don't care for (solid pass on college or high school AU, doubly so if it's extremely Americanised) or that I simply don't see the point of (as someone who's been known to question what difference an otherwise-canon-ish soulmate AU makes). For crossovers, I tend to prefer some kind of fusion between the universes rather than straight up mashing all the characters together. Unless it's a crack scenario, in which case collide away.

Anyway. Highlights of variously-implausible AU things I have committed in full seriousness:

• MCU!AU of Detective Conan that started out just from CA:TWS and spiralled from there
• also literally all of the DC/MK fic in this series
• Murderbot!AU snippets of Guardian and Heaven Official's Blessing, respectively
• MDZS!AU of FMA because zombie Hawkeye, so why not
• modern day FMA where Alphonse is [redacted for spoilers]
• Welcome to Night Vale Resembool
• Nirvana in Fire wingfic
• The Mentalist but spookier
• modern day MDZS because – once again – necromancer detective Wei Wuxian, why not
• multiple ones for Murderbot: MedUnit AU, building AU, and (possibly most bizarrely, if only because of my unfamiliarity with the subject matter) figure skating AU
• and also ATLA: bodyswap Toph and Zuko, and zombie apocalypse AU taken 100% in seriousness despite how it might sound

…and that's nowhere near an exhaustive list, just the more recent ones. I write a lot of AU, to put it mildly.

And a final obligatory mention to my longstanding vendetta against coffeeshop AU. Anyone's guess how much in jest that is by this point.