.................wait Spoiler: i, what So do they have MK turn into a Temmie on death, or do they completely throw out the whole human-and-monster friendship that went WRONG arc of the game in order to have a world plagued by horror terror temmies?
Spoiler i think mk turns into a temmie when they die most of the time. and there is a village of benign floweys taking the place of the tem village most of the time.
Why would you write same-plot-different-characters AUs if you weren't going to try to make the direction of the plot plausible, and tweak it where necessary? That's most of the fun of that kind of AU. At least for me.
i think underswap originated as a fanart aesthetic swap au, and then became popular, and underswap sans and underswap papyrus, at least, became characters in their own right, not just au versions of the canon ones. and i think that kind of thing happens a lot with aus involving the skelebros (particularly sans). some of those au sans have been described, i believe, as their creator's oc sanses, which sounds like a contradiction but turns out to not be one once the breadth of content and amount of people contributing to that au sans' fandom is taken into account. kinda like the onceler thing, with greedler and whatnot. au versions taking on tremendous lives of their own, becoming characters that people are attached to far beyond just their connections to their canon counterparts. and it is really cool, as long as i acknowledge what it is and don't expect classic underswap (or any other well-known au with iffy characterization/worldbuilding) to be a real look at what undertale would be like if everyone was swapped or something. but all these alternate papyruses, sanses and gasters do make me worry that if i create and draw (a) skeleton fancharacter(s), people will assume it is just a new au version of the canon ones. making skeletons distinct in character design, drawing-wise, seems tricky and All These Different Looking Skeletons Are Just AU Sanses doesn't help matters there.
THANK YOU, YES. I love roleswaps, but part of the fun for me is figuring out how a character could wind up in that role in the first place, not just switching the personalities with no explanation.
I'll be over here in my tiny fandom where it was really easy to figure out how to roleswap two of the major characters and the main outcome was that instead of two very screwed up people there was one slightly screwed up person and one ticking time bomb of repression and stress. Also the world's even more likely to end than in canon.
So @cassikat and I were discussing my PearlRose hanahaki disease thing and: [3/17/2017 11:47:15 PM] acey you useless lesbian: u saw my mention of horrifying flower lung disease pearl right [3/17/2017 11:48:30 PM] acey you useless lesbian: because think of all the fucked up places that could go [4:34:47 AM] karkat's bug junk: I DID IT'S REAL GOOD....... [4:35:08 AM] acey you useless lesbian: GOOD [4:35:42 AM] karkat's bug junk: flower lung disease could be so nasty........i love me some body horror [4:35:48 AM] acey you useless lesbian: yessssss [4:36:09 AM] acey you useless lesbian: and obviously it's roses growing in there, because i'm a fucking slut for thematic bullshit [4:36:37 AM] karkat's bug junk: YESSSSSSS [4:36:38 AM] karkat's bug junk: yes [4:37:28 AM] acey you useless lesbian: i could also make it even more fucked up and have the surgical option not be a thing :3c [4:38:15 AM] acey you useless lesbian: like, have it be a genuine "you're living on borrowed time if ur crush never reciprocates" thing [4:38:50 AM] acey you useless lesbian: ...BRUH [4:39:08 AM] acey you useless lesbian: WHAT IF IT'S INHERENTLY NOT GONNA GET REQUITED BECAUSE ROSE ALREADY DIED [4:41:47 AM] karkat's bug junk: THAT'S SO FUCKED UP I LOVE IT [4:42:11 AM] karkat's bug junk: like pearl just kept waiting to see if rose would love her back and NOW SHE CAN"T [4:43:43 AM] acey you useless lesbian: YUP >:3 I AM SO HYPE TO WRITE THIS
The #1 thing that will have me closing a fic and being bitter every time i remember it exists, is stilted dialogue. If you cant read it back to yourself, outloud, and imagine the characters voice over your own, I cant read it. No amount of plot or description can bring me back, I just wont be able to engage. And if it has that voice, the descriptions, spelling, grammar, all the rest of it, can be embarrassingly bad and my brain will just sorta... skim over. Make do. And I usually wont even notice But my biggest pet peeve when reading is when a character's description is just... wrong? Like fanon will take over, or a popular fanart, or it will be turned into a live-action production, and suddenly Percy has "piercing, deep blue eyes" or Ron is "straightening up to reach Harry's height," or Briar is "looming over" a girl canonically 4 inches taller than him. This kills me. Like, I read on anyway, but goddamn am I annoyed.
Characters talking as if they are 14 year old Tumblr kids. All the latest slang, and accurately modeled SJ-teenager worldviews. Which would be great if that's what the characters are, but in the mouth of someone far away from that, not so much.
I am not sure which character I love and adore doing that would fill me with the greatest terror. That is a hard fucking choice.
Ok I mean like I guess Jame might somehow absorb this information as she is curious and absorbs all things, but she sure as fuck wouldn't use it like a tumblr kid and would instead probably get into like weird honor debates with the children. So that would be unspeakably painful. Mercy meanwhile I can't even imagine fucking knowing it at all so that's pretty fucking awful. And then there is Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo does not deserve this. He is too charmingly British.
ngl, it sorta annoys me when people shove the warnings at the bottom of the chapter, like - it feels like they missed half a step there? Oh god, I remember 'laved' - it showed up in the RP circles too. Also, I think, mostly in blowjob scenes? It's been a long time and I don't remember details beyond "it kept turning up a lot in smut for a while".
I'm fully happy with putting warnings at the end of the chapter as long as the author clearly states at the beginning that additional warnings are at the end. I honestly prefer to run the risk of being squicked to dealing with overzealous warnings. Those can sometimes make it difficult for me to read without devoting a lot of background thought to continuously analyzing whether I ought to feel uncomfortable. Not even whether I do, more whether I can imagine that it would be possible. This kills the fun.
Oh hey, I forgot, but that works really well on AO3, since authors can put that "see end of work for notes" link. If they don't put the link, there's still the imperfect way of clicking comments to get sent to the bottom of the page. So long as they mention where the content warnings are, it works.
I was reading some fic with a pair of homeschooled jungle freaks, and one of them was excited to film outdoors in the wilderness, and says something along the lines of, "it'll be like we're real adventurers, roughing it in the forest!" And then the other character starts this fucking tirade of how saying that is privileged because, despite being a pair of homeschooled jungle freaks, they're both rich or some nonsense, so they will never know what it's really like to have to rough it in the outback, and to say that is offensive. I couldn't even finish the chapter, it was so jarring.
Oh yeah, my friend who's been keeping me up-to-date on the exciting developments in terrible Yuri on Ice fanfic keeps seeing that. Up to and including characters using Tumblr memes out loud in dialogue.
(YOI fic is apparently also much improved if you get a word-replace extension and change "quadruple axel" to "gravity-defying stunt.")
On the warnings issue I really wish to fuck people would just pick "Arthur refused to use archive warnings" and then just do fucking nothing on that front instead of putting them at the end. You clearly don't want to and there is a baked in option for you to not do so. You're also entirely free to go "No" to anyone who asks.
re: warnings: there are times when relevant warnings would also spoil the story, but are things that deserve to be warned for. as long as the author states beforehand that the warnings are in the end notes - and on ao3, if you use the end notes feature it automatically creates a link at the beginning of the fic or chapter to the end notes for that fic or chapter - i think it's a good compromise.
that feel when you typo author as arthor and cannot be assed to fix it Also I continue to absolutely despise putting warnings on my shit. Yay.
