Subject: Wait what?
Author:
Posted on: 2014-08-13 20:38:00 UTC

Okay, I don't know about John Crichton, but Nesh got that covered. But as for the rest...

Bruce Wayne funding the police. Are you kidding? It could be a superinteresting and suspenseful story about a guy basically owning a bunch of crooked cops and paying them to do the right thing. It could look into how having that kind of power would affect him. How would Bruce Wayne be, if he had decided not to get his own hands dirty, but to let other fight the fight? The possibilities are endless! I'd read the stuffing out off the AU!

John Watson. If we go by the Sherlock verse, they very specifically make the point that Watson is addicted to danger, even without Sherlock to drag him into it. And even in the original he was a war vet, a doctor and something of a ladies man. Do you really think that a story about Watson if he never meets Sherlock would just be him sitting on his hands doing nothing interesting?

And Arthur Dent, don't even get me started on Arthur Dent. Arthur Dent start his story by laying down in front of a bulldozer that is about to demolish his house. Is that your definition of dull? He is the everyman, the sane guy in a crazy world, the one we identify with, but he is not dull. No-one wants to identify with someone dull.

And no, most highschool AU's are unremarkable, for the same reason that most fanfics are: They are written by people who have yet to develop the skill and practice to write interesting stories. But look at something like OFUM or HFA. All the canon characters are taken out of their usual settings and made teachers and yet each and everyone of them are completely in character.

As the great bearded sage, Chuck Wendig says, plot is made of people. You start with interesting characters and let their wants and needs and actions build an interesting story. You don't start with a uninteresting character and put him in an interesting setting or throw interesting events at him, hoping it will make for a good story. It's simply a waste of good settings and events. Save them for when you have a character that you don't yourself describe as dull.

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