Snowflake Challenge #3: AUs

[bittermoons]

If I only do one challenge this year, it has to be this one. I'm primarily an AU writer. If characters have magic powers/sci-fi skills that basically give them magic powers in canon, I feel almost obligated to strip them away, and the reverse is true for characters with no powers. (I've just been doing more of the former because of what I've been watching and reading, but every sports anime I watch tempts me to give the characters magic powers.) I think stripping away powers forces me to really explore what makes a character interesting in the first place: who are they at their core without powers? Which is excellent for focusing on some juicy character development and placing it front and center.   

I also love writing AUs because I'm a control freak. I like worldbuilding a lot—it's one of my favorite parts of writing, and I don't like giving it up to someone else LOL—and I like having absolute control over it, because even if the setting is contemporary Japan/China/America/wherever canon takes place, there's still a lot of worldbuilding work that can go into writing contemporary settings. My longest fics (including one I'm still working on) use timestamps to mark dates, and I use timelines when I write to make sure everything has a logical flow and could actually happen when it's supposed to, so I guess that's also become my Thing as well haha. I do a lot of research when I write--I'm actually planning on including a selected bibliography with a WIP once I've posted it, because catching up with what the scientific literature for a certain subset of academia looked like ten years ago was more trouble than it was worth. When I both read and write, I have a weakness for historical AUs and those based on folklore and myths.

An AU that I wrote fairly recently based on folktales is when the rabbit comes down the mountain, a BNHA Fuyumi/Miruko fic about gods and humans.