Mayor of Meme Town - ==>

It just sounds like you don't really like AUs at all, haha.

Isn't that why people do AUs? Some people just do it badly. Karkat and Sollux as humans might not interest you but it doesn't mean it is necessarily badly done or automatically OOC; the powers and the horns don't make the characters and I am sure someone in the fandom must be doing it right somewhere. I mean sometimes you get shit like 4chords which almost definitely exists because the author wants human prettyboy MCR Gamzee to fuck some other OOC characters. But I've heard good things about Cities in Dust which is a detective AU about Terezi and Dave and Derpbent which is a bloodswap? (I haven't read either of them yet.)

The main college AU, I can't remember what it's called, is pretty generic/boring but that is less because it is an AU and more because the author has set it up as a soap opera--the shipping is ultimately the focus instead of an actual plot or non-romantic character drama. That's an unfortunate pitfall of most college stories, fanfiction or otherwise, because romance is the easiest way to rile up inter-character drama and an easy way to hook readers. But you can do it well! Bobwhite (an original story) was a very good comic about the lives of college students because the characters had lives and problems outside of romance and THAT was the focus, how they grew as people and dealt with issues and had stupid fun. And I think that if we had an AU like that instead of shippingfests, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

And that applies to all AUs, not just The Trolls Are Human And 18+ AUs.

On the side a special mention goes to that Promstuck adventure on tumblr and the Marchingstuck AU, where all the trolls are still trolls, Kanaya is still undead, etc., they are just all in high school together for some reason. I don't know, is that the setup you'd rather have? Not to say Promstuck is a bastion of Good AUs, because it is more guilty pleasure than masterpiece (it makes no move to present itself as anything but a shippingfest) but it is at least remarkable in that the authors are pretty aware of what they are doing and don't take it seriously.

I don't actually read many AUs. The ones I mentioned are ones that have been recommended to me and I think I will check them out sometime later. All I know is 4chords, the most popular college AU and Red Dead Virgo are not good.

Can you like... give an example from any fandom of what looks like a "proper" AU to you, because I'm just not getting it. At all. You can change the setting but you can't change the characters to an extent that they blend nicely?

Unless you are saying that the only good AUs are like Baserapt is, which is a story about the trolls' future if Sgrub never existed. And it IS good but I do not think it is fair to fault other stories bending settings instead of timelines, because both can work.

NA

Mmm, I kiiind of agree here. I'm leery of agreeing that you're supposed to do it a certain way, since nobody is really supposed to do anything except have fun, but I do agree that just going "this character would be this stereotype" and leaving it at that gives you less to work with, and is less interesting, than "this character would be this stereotype but with ..."

On the other hand, if Feferi is only a background character in your high school AU, I think it's pretty reasonable if you don't want to put a lot of time into detailing, say, her being tailed by FBI agents wherever she goes and having to escape mortal peril a lot? I also think it's justified – preferable even – to want to lower the stakes if your AU premise isn't about mortal peril. If your AU is about how the characters would deal with high school, you can't keep all the danger and murdering because it's impossible to keep the focus on high school when all this murdering and danger is happening. For example, Vriska has murdered a lot of people. There aren't a lot of settings other than Alternia where she could have done that without getting in a lot of trouble, and that trouble is probably not what people want the focus of their AU to be!

So you have to either make it really silly (like for example in Promstuck where the fact that Kanaya had to fight her way through hordes of the undead to get to prom is a throwaway joke), or you have to tone it down and find an equivalent that's more appropriate to the level of drama that suits your story. And sometimes that's going to mean Feferi not being in a ton of danger, or Vriska not having murdered anybody, and that's fine and doesn't necessarily mean that the characters have been mangled beyond recognition.

If you don't want to deal with the repercussions of how Vriska murdering and people trying to murder Feferi would go in the human world, you don't have to, you can treat it like it's Alternia and not a big deal, then go on with whatever drama you do want.

That's really kind of preposterously limiting, anon. I mean, yes, it'd be great to see something like that set on Alternia and I am disappointed that I never have seen it, but part of the appeal of stuff like college or high school AUs is seeing characters like the trolls dealing with stuff the reader is personally familiar with. That's why people like real-world AUs for characters who don't canonically live in the real world. And it's not impossible to make those things work without keeping everyone's abilities to hear screams of the imminently deceased/status as heir to a vast galactic empire/coming from a society where murder is par for the course. You just have to find different ways around it. That's kind of why AUs are fun – working that stuff out, finding the equivalents.

I mean, with Vriska, what's wrong with taking out the murdering and replacing it with something that might have given her the same sorts of insecurities if she was growing up in a society where murdering being okay wasn't a thing? I don't think taking out high-stakes murdery shit necessarily involves toning the characters down – just the scope of the stuff that they have to deal with. And that's fine.

But that's kind of what the trolls already are.
What is? I'm not sure what part of my comment you're replying to here, haha.

BUT UH I disagree with basically everything you've said here because I don't think that a character driven AU in a real-world college setting where everybody is human and nobody is getting maimed is inherently a bad one! You think that it dampens the characters and makes it less interesting, and I don't, and that's about all I can say, I guess.

I mean, I'm not personally interested in many human!troll college AUs, but that's not because of the issues you've outlined, it's because I don't like the ships they're about, or because they make everybody white and that pisses me off, or because they're just not written very well. I don't think the idea is inherently "doing it wrong". Maybe keeping the troll stuff would make these ones a bit less boring? But I'm pretty sure they'd just be bad in different ways. These kinds of AUs can work, and mortal peril isn't the only way to get them to.

(Plus, you know, another reason people do AUs is that they want to do stuff with the characters without all the mortal peril, like, that is a lot of the point for some people. I know that one of my key motivations in writing a setting-swap AU was that it would be nice to have something with all the kids and trolls where they weren't all at constant risk of death.)

Something like Marchingstuck/Promstuck doesn't really have to work on the level you're describing, I don't think. In that AU's case, the focus is exclusively on humor in the form of over-the-top inter-character drama and zany antics that there wouldn't be room for in canon, and okay it's not "a good AU" in the sense that there isn't any worldbuilding and it's taken for granted that there's stuff about the characters' backgrounds that doesn't, strictly speaking, make sense, but I definitely wouldn't say it doesn't work, because it does. It's just acknowledged that the world where it's set making sense isn't the point, and it's easy to suspend your disbelief to enjoy it because in the context it doesn't actually matter.

Sure, that kind of thing isn't to everyone's taste, but it does exactly what it sets out to do and it does it very well, imo.