Endings

[extrapenguin]

(But! The Guardian rewatchalong has yet to end. Episode 35, with time travel talk!)

Observation of the day: Other people seem to have a much higher tolerance for fairytale endings than I do; I find a lot of the more wish-fulfillment-y ones unrealistic and prefer stuff like "no matter what the rules are, you can live happily within them" to "if the author likes you, the rules will go out the window for your HEA". Perhaps primarily because the former is a thing that can happen while the latter is not applicable to reality.

(By "the rules go out the window", I mean stuff like e.g. a slash ship in a royalty arranged marriage AU in a world where there is no mpreg, no sexual nonexclusivity to create an heir with a concubine, and no stuff to handwave away the lack of biokid heirs, whether that be worldbuilding so that the monarchy is nonhereditary or simply a mention of there being a convenient nephew for them to adopt. There are lots and lots of other ways to go full fairytale in a fashion that I find unbelievable, but this scenario is perhaps the easiest to explain.)

Comments

[china_shop]

Things like that work okay for me if it's the kind of fic that has broken away from reality and exists in a shiny bubble of wish-fulfilment. (See also most porn star AUs.) The more realistic it tries to seem, the more difficult is it to ignore the world-building problems, imo.

[extrapenguin]

The more realistic it tries to seem, the more difficult is it to ignore the world-building problems, imo.
Yeah, this. Actually, with AUs, my biggest problem is often the lack of/inconsistent worldbuilding; as a result, I rarely click on them. (I'm also a worldbuilding fan who falls in love with the world of the original canon, not just the characters, which gives its own layer.)