And with a green and yellow melancholy

FANDOM SNOWFLAKE 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.

In general, I prefer AUs that tend hew closer to canon, but as of late, I have been branching out, putting some time in on what I would call setting-swap AUs, where the canon universe was, idk, eaten by a black hole or something and now everyone is baristas (roll with it). This is new to me and in general I'm slow moving in it, as I am slow in consuming fandom content in general.

But here are my top 5 AU types:

1. Canon Divergence/For Want of a Nail AUs: I really fucking love a good what if? This was my favorite genre when I was a kid and it remains so as an adult: What if Darth Vader realized Leia was his daughter on Bespin in Empire Strikes Back? What if Padme didn't die of sadness at the end of ROTS? What if Persephone didn't eat the seeds? So much depends on such small decisions sometimes. I really love these AUs absolutely best. Especially when such a small decision ripples out into a huge change. Many Vader & Leia fanfic falls into this trope and I love each and every one, especially when the Leia has lived past ROTJ, gotten past her feelings on Vader, on the Empire, and is now thrown right back to her youth.

2. Fusions: Fandom fusions are tricky; generally, you have to know both canons (or at least elements of both canons) to really be able to enjoy them. But when they work, they really work. I feel like its one of the hardest to get right, but seeing how people tie together universes really makes it super neat to see a good fusion AU flourish. It's not often I'm in a mass effect mood, but often when I am, I think of an AU proposed by an old friend of mine, where everyone had a pokemon daemon. I still think her choice for Saren, a Skarmory, remains fitting.

3. IN SPAAAAAAAACE AU: Probably my favorite setting swap: in space, the consequences are always higher, the dangers are always bigger, the world is always weirder. I feel like this really can highlight fun character details when you try to translate a more mundane setting into sci-fi spaceworld; what would Ted Lasso be in space? How would you translate the soccer to something capable of being done on a spaceship? There was a fun thing going in a hadestown discord I haunt last year when Among US AU's were the rage, which poked fun lightly at canonical events and seeing how they married Greek mythology with space age times and tech was truly a delight.

4. Mythology/Folkloric AU: I'm sorry, y'all are sleeping on this. I don't see it done often, but this is one of my favorite AUs, where canonical characters and/or events are eventually made into in-universe folklore, and the story we get is one that's been shifted through hundreds and thousands of mirrors, decades or even centuries past the original event(s). It's a pretty rare genre, but I've seen it a couple times in Doctor Who fanfiction. My absolute favorite is this fanfic, where Rose Tyler searches for the doctor, doesn't find him (or, the right him, at any rate), and ultimately becomes the Doctor herself.

5. Dystopian AUs: Post 2020, this is more of a legacy category, because it's gotten harder for me to read oppressively Grim-dark worlds. (I still love darkfic, but it's gone down to a kind of not-now sort of space; it's harder for me to read when the world feels dark and grim.) But I read so much of this as a teenager, as an adult, that it would feel odd not putting this on my list anymore. I love a good oppressive grim-dark where people still have hope, still get up, still make the coffee. One of my favorite AUs for Mass Effect is imagining what happens post-Refusal ending: sure, the universe is going dark, but that doesn't mean Shepard is going to let it go dark while s/he can still fight to make it a better place. It's not a perfect world and its often a sad one, but I'm touched by the idea of someone knowing a bad end, and keeping on fighting it, even knowing it may be pointless. Also, frankly, I feel like a lot of my teenage ID was fed by enemies-to-lovers "We Hate One Another But the Magistry/Government/Convenient Excuse Dictates We Must Wed, Somehow" trope that was everywhere in the early 00s, and still influences a lot of the push/pull factor in relationships that I write today.