December daily: magical AUs
Dec. 8th, 2013 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resonanttaliahale prompts: Magical AUs (be they magical realism, high fantasy, whatever) yay/nay?Still a few days left.
Until I had this prompt, I hadn't realized how many different kinds of magical AUs there are!
Send everyone to Hogwarts: Well, in non-high school fandoms, that's a triply alternate universe: change setting, de-age everyone, and add magic. Which may be why most of the stories I've seen hardly do more than gesture at the changes before writing about two guys snogging in a hallway.
Send everyone to Hogwarts, artwork version: Usually works much better for me than the fictional version, because I'm not disappointed by the lack of complexity; I can simply enjoy a drawing of John Watson in Quidditch gear.
Magic realism: In non-fannish fiction, I'm kind of over magic realism; it seems to be what literary writers do when they want (1) something impossible to happen or (2) something Really Symbolic to happen, but they don't want to mar their stories with anything that bears the horrible stench of genre about it.
Possibly that last is why it doesn't bug me as much about fannish circles; we're lots of things, but we're certainly not anti-genre snobs! Also, fandom is rarely humorless, which is another common failing in the kind of magic realism you get in literary fiction.
Magic realism was of course canon in Due South, and probably in other fandoms that I can't think of offhand, but even if someone wanted to write a story in the most realistic fandom you can think of and have the characters be advised by songbirds or wake up overgrown by unexplained rosebushes, I don't think I'd mind too much.
Werewolf/vampire AU: To be successful, this stuff requires some good worldbuilding, and the fannish works I've seen usually haven't had it; the more common approach is to pick up Rules of Vampirism or Rules of Werewolfism out of some other canon and then go straight to the knotting or the blood-drinking.
High fantasy: Is this a thing? I don't believe I've ever seen it, unless you count Smauglock, which I don't. I suspect it would suffer from the same worldbuilding problem that vampire/werewolf AUs have for me.
Just add a magic thing: For as long as I've loved fanfiction, I've been loving stories that were canon-realistic except that little matter of the telepathy, the time the witch put the two of you in each other's bodies, etc. So to hell with world-building; I say yes please!
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Date: 12/9/13 12:31 am (UTC)High fantasy: Is this a thing? I don't believe I've ever seen it, unless you count Smauglock, which I don't. I suspect it would suffer from the same worldbuilding problem that vampire/werewolf AUs have for me
Huh. You know, I don't think high fantasy is a big thing. I've read it occasionally but the issue is usually that there's so much world-building involved to make it work that the characters don't feel well characterised by the end of it. They seem like characters with the right name and who look like that, but not those characters.
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Date: 12/11/13 03:38 am (UTC)I can see what you mean about high fantasy; it has definite genre conventions as far as things like formality of language, so that you can have a person who's believable as Lestrade or a person who's believable as a Tolkein wizard but probably not both. The Regencyesque arranged-marriage story often suffers from the same problems.
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