A Question for Fanficcers

[steepholm]

Is there a term in common use to distinguish fics consistent with canon (e.g. "Neville and his Grandmother Pack his Bags the Night before he first goes to Hogwarts") from those that contradict it (e.g. "After the Final Victory of the Death Eaters, Draco decides to Employ Ron Weasley as his Houseboy")?

Comments

[jadelennox]

I agree, though some fandoms wouldn't bother to call the latter AU; it often depends how much of their corpus tends that way, anyway.

Fanlore gives examples of AU, including:

The most strictly defined AUs may diverge from their source canons in a single specific way (for example, a Star Wars AU in which the first Death Star is not destroyed, a Merlin AU in which Merlin comes to Camelot as an agent of Nimueh, or a Castle AU in which Johanna Beckett was not murdered). More broadly, an AU may transplant a given source work's characters to a radically different setting, shift the genre in which their adventures occur, and/or alter their professions and goals, such as those popularized in the Xena: Warrior Princess "Uber" genre.

There's some fascinating taxonomies in that article.

[steepholm]

Thanks - I shall burrow into it!

[nixwilliams]

Yep, the first would be canon compliant/missing scene and the second could be an AU.

However, as jadelennox points out, an AU often takes elements of canon and puts them into a completely different setting (e.g. "Harry Potter is running in the county council elections with the help of his brilliant campaign manager Hermione Granger, but local gentleman farmer and man about town Draco Malfoy has been put forward to contest the seat for the Conservatives and is proving a wily rival" or "Molly Weasley runs a chaotic but popular cafe in Warren Street with the haphazard assistance of her twin sons, George and Fred. When a disheveled young homeless boy named Harry arrives on the scene, they decide to offer him a job").

[nixwilliams]

Now I kind of want to read those two fics.

[steepholm]

There's only one way to make that happen...

[nixwilliams]

Bat my eyelashes at you until you oblige? :D :D :D