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i admittedly am a huge fan of alternate universes. i think that they give you so much more room to toy with a character's thought process and how that ties into the world around them, but having said that, something i'm always more hesitant to try is any fanfic set in historical times. i think that there are obvious no-gos here (as in, i'm always extremely perplexed when i see any fanfiction set during world war two, because, seriously? i don't think that the fandom culture around shipping exactly promotes the careful treatment such gruesome events deserve, but i'm sure there are exceptions lying around somewhere. i'm not going to be going off in search of them, though), but that even more benign historical settings have me on the fence. historical settings, more than anything, even omegaverse, have a tendency to dip into extremely embarrassing lands. working in the confines of fanfic-typical self-indulgence doesn't couple the best with largely asinine things like what sort of materials made up the toilets during a certain time period. and, secondly, it's just kind of odd to have to try and translate the language into the time period, which you do kind of have to do if you want to maintain any impression of consistency with the world. i think that's majorly why i don't really stumble upon any historical alternate universes that are written by "more experienced" fanfic writers; the bulk of what i see tends to be concentrated in people who have just hopped over to ao3 from wattpad.
it's a nice thing in theory, honestly. i'm not opposed to people toying around with settings and characters and whatever else they want, but i just think that historical aus are extremely difficult to get right without diving overboard into very blatant historical inaccuracy or just plain offensiveness. i'm not trying to disregard the efforts writers put into their work by any means; i know first-hand that authors put research into what they write, but i think that a historical au requires a level of work that's nearly fundamentally incompatible with the attitude that fandom likes to push, which is to say a faster, unthinking appreciation for shipfics.
it's a nice thing in theory, honestly. i'm not opposed to people toying around with settings and characters and whatever else they want, but i just think that historical aus are extremely difficult to get right without diving overboard into very blatant historical inaccuracy or just plain offensiveness. i'm not trying to disregard the efforts writers put into their work by any means; i know first-hand that authors put research into what they write, but i think that a historical au requires a level of work that's nearly fundamentally incompatible with the attitude that fandom likes to push, which is to say a faster, unthinking appreciation for shipfics.
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There's another episode about research, if you're interested...one of the hosts is really big into historical AUs, specifically this Vietnam War era Harry Potter AU that it sounds like she did some pretty extensive research about. Might be of interest!
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