I don't fully like. get AUs as a concept in fandom/fanfic. "Oh what if the characters from my favorite superhero comic were actually all working in a coffee shop" then they wouldn't be the same characters??? People are made up of their experiences and you created new experiences entirely. Who are these people
When it's like "I tried to directly translate everything that happened in the old stories to a thing where they're all Pokemon trainers" or whatever I sorta get it but so often it's like
I pulled out all the interesting character bits and now they are Nobodies. Isn't that awesome?
no
Those are just dolls for you to play with idk
I guess the main thing is like
did you spend a ton of time thinking to yourself "okay for this college AU I am going to have to invent an entire new system of education in this world I'm coming up with to explain why she can have spooky void powers and go to college" or did you go "wah I wanna write about her in college I will shove her into college"
U gotta be really Weird about the worldbuilding or else I don't respect you
@junebug as someone who wrote a crossover comic that was largely encroaching on the territory of being an AU, a lot of the impetus to write it was absolutely just playing with dolls. specifically i saw the homestuck tarot deck and was like "wouldn't it be kinda funny if each character on these corresponded to the jojo stand named after it"
it ended up being a lot more like a puzzle or exercise as a result, rather than a standard AU. having some of it out of my hands made it less boring lol
@junebug it helped that a major theme in Homestuck later down the line became about "what makes someone themselves? what makes one version of a character less of themself than another?"
so naturally when slotting them into Jojo Part 3, a somewhat fate-centric monster of the week shonen, i was able to explore this theme a little bit while still mostly just playing around with said "dolls". not with much competency, but it's also fun to draw parallels between things never meant to be compared.