#my second favorite flavor of au is 'rewriting canon scenes to fit My Character's themes and motifs'

[herearedragons]

fanfic writer ask meme!!! B and M :)

B:  What was the first fandom you read fic in?  Which was the first you wrote fic for?

for reading, pretty sure it was Hetalia (I have come across fanfiction before but pretty sure this was the first fandom I actively sought out fanfiction of), and writing...... for properly FandomTM writing, it was one (1) attempt at backstory for my Skyrim player character and then Dragon Age. technically there was fic-adjacent writing I did before this, but that was more me appropriating pieces of media with a friend rather than Participating In Fandom. like I wrote fic about gijinkas (human versions) of the plants vs. zombies plants and transformers ocs (despite not being in the transformers fandom) that didn't get published anywhere because it was for the one (1) other person who knew what the heck I was talking about. I don't really think about those as me doing fanfiction because the point wasn't really to interact with the fandom, I was kind of just using a random piece of media as building blocks for an original story, but technically it is also fic

M: What’s the weirdest AU scenario you’ve ever come up with?  Did it turn into a story?

....after some introspection, I think I literally only make weird AUs? like I haven't done a single classic soulmate AU or a role swap AU or anything like that. no. it's all "what if all four of my Inquisitors were 19th century people investigating a paranormal horror mystery that then directly caused that universe's version of the Conclave explosion" (the literal plot of The Breach, my WIP longfic that's going to be one year old in a couple of months)

(update: okay actually. I do have a decent amount of normal AUs that are basically "what if my video game blorbo but with a slightly different backstory". like Selene's companion au. also some genre swaps and the classic "putting blorbo from one piece of media into another piece of media")

other highlights include:

what if my Lavellan was a cyborg in a cyberpunk setting and his cybernetic implants were haunted by Mythal (shoutout to sorrow.cy, which is a thing I wrote and posted on AO3 a couple years ago and then deleted. reposted on this blog for archival purposes though)

what if Solas was a cosmic horror entity (shoutout to The Dread One, which is a thing that exists on my AO3 Right Now)

what if the red lyrium future from In Hushed Whispers was a The Last Of Us-esque apocalypse (a short fic I also wrote a couple years ago and deleted, and, tragically, it did not get archived anywhere so I wasn't able to get it back. the concept was that it's a modern world but red lyrium is growing everywhere and red lyrium dust is in the air so you have to protect yourself both from breathing it and from hearing the song, and it had the Valo-Kas as a group of survivors. rip to that fic, it was a good one)