tangeriner | Snowflake Challenge: Day Three

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of skier kicking up snow on a snow white background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

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.

Most of the AUs I write are canon divergences ones -- I got my start in X-Men comics fandom, way back in the 90s, and Marvel has always had a very strong "What if...?" approach to things. Like, literally, there was a series called "What if...?" that canon-diverged all over the place and I loved it, especially when it picked an X-Men-related storyline to diverge from. My favourite thing is to pick a specific issue (or episode for my non-static fandoms) and diverge from there.

I don't write a lot of other types of AUs, in part because I usually like the canon setting enough, but also because I can get a little ridiculous with the research aspect of AUs. Being a librarian, I tend to research the living daylights out of things, and that's so much work, haha.

That said, I do have a lot of fun putting Shatterstar in particular into AU settings and making him work. He has such a comic-y backstory that trying to fit him into a different setting is a really fun challenge. Like even the basic fact of how do you make the name Shatterstar work logically when you've removed him from the various X-Men settings? I've only actually written two of the stories in my head (the pirate AU and the incubus AU), but I have so many unwritten Rictor/Shatterstar AUs in my WIP folder, including a Pacific Rim fusion. I have never actually written a fusion before, but when I finally do, it will be that one. The idea of drift compatibility just hits so many buttons.