Subject: We were discussing this on IRC the other day...
Author:
Posted on: 2010-02-20 02:05:00 UTC

(For those who are interested, it's channel #PPC on Blitzed, by the way)

Contrary to what has been posted, simply being an AU definitely does not make a fic badfic, either in reality or in the eyes of this community. Conversely, though, saying "This is an AU" is no shield for bad writing and poor logic.

Creating a good AU isn't the easiest - To paraphrase Earthsea, to change a part of the world is to change the entire world. Anything you change will have (or will have had) consequences that shake the entire storyline, and a lot of authors don't take the time to think them through. That is what makes so many AUs badfic, not the fact that they start from a different series of assumptions.

I haven't seen Avatar, so I can't comment on how well what you've come up with fits with the movie and other Canon. However, you have some very good points. 32 billion is an immense number, way beyond what a 50 years post-peak civilization would have. Your changes to Pandora are slightly more concerning to me - once again, I haven't seen the film, but from what I've heard, it's very much a humans-are-bad type thing. This would make putting Hell's Gate in a hometree and saving a clan of Na'vi very much out of character for the Canonical RDA.

To summarize, AUs are perfectly valid. Any fanfiction that deviates from the Canon at all is essentially asking "what if?" - all calling a fic 'AU' really says is that the "what if" happened in the past instead of the present. However, AUs are very easy to do poorly, so you're going to have to put a lot of extra thought into making sure everything works out right. Remember the butterfly effect - even tiny changes can have massive consequences.

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