Do you have a particular definition for 'fantasy world' in mind here?

any fictional world will do, I think? but this is specifically about AUs of preexisting fiction, not fully original worlds

Also not sure if you mean picking out an AU version of a setting that already exists, like a specific fanfic, or picking out a setting to go to an AU version of?

I mean (for all settings) picking out an existing AU that is depicted in some form of media.

So, for example, specifying "Mauling Snarks" as a Worm AU because things are a lot less grimdark and more survivable, etc.

hmmmmmmmm

I guess technically pirates has published a bit of their RWBY AU? It's a bit of a brighter and more intelligent version of the setting with a bigger magic system and cool girlfriends in it and good transition tech w/ the aura awakening process? Though it's still a good bit deathworldy, so...

We will totally take 'technically's for this purpose! And yes, I think I'd probably prefer the Pirates' RWBY AU to the canon timeline. I'm not sure how much one can actually tone down the danger of RWBY without making it not RWBY, since the protagonists are professional monster fighters.

This is true! Also not sure how much timeline control you get for this - there's a decent number of fics like that exponentially multiplying succubus AU of worm that are only particularly nice if you get in at the very end...

I'm sorry, exponentially multiplying succubus AU? I am intrigued and concerned.

A) I don't think I've read that one; do you have any other identifying details?
B) We (hypothetically) don't get timeline control; you're just ending up in a particular AU setting at some point during its timeline.

if i produce media now, depicting an AU that i just made up of a fictional setting that i also just made up, does that make it a valid target, or is that a bit too "technically"?

Provided you actually do produce the media before (again, hypothetically) a month or two from now? That totally counts.

https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/succubus-worm-complete.7134/ It was this one!

Thank you!

any AUs with easily accessible mary sue notebooks okay I'll stop cheating and try to find a real answer

That's definitely the best (assuming the notebook lands on somebody mostly aligned), but there are lots of settings that it hasn't gotten to yet. I guess that's actually a practical reason to go write a ton of notebook threads ...

Eh... I would seriously consider Hiver's Culture Trek

Ooh! That would be a good one. They at least manage to give the Borg a black eye in a reasonable way.

it's far from perfect but it's trying in a way I appreciate

I'm also not sure if anyone has written it but a nobody dies AU of Outer Wilds would also be super compelling

star trek is a nice place but it's also a setting with a bunch of giant wars and capricious cosmic beings in it? Not nesscarily the most stable place, and it'd be easy for some background lore element to have horrifying implications that just wasn't brough up... But it's still a relatively reasonable choice, I think? Just much to be aware of

well yeah...

Sure, but if you had to go to any Star Trek, it's a matter of which Star Trek you'd want to go to.

This particular AU is pretty low on onscreen deity
maybe stuff like that is lurking off screen

Well, at the least you'd have to deal with Q.
Actually, I wonder if "Meet Qte" would be better, since it's got a Bell trying to get Q to be helpful in it.

hmm... Q is vaguely implied with the Borg being present but isn't actually explicitly mentioned iirc
or not outside of being a thing in the simulation show
but that's not all known to be canon

Oh, maybe you're right. It's been a long time since I read Hiver's stuff, and I might be mixing it up.

From Stargate... I would say Stargate Reopened. I don't really know where that story would have ended up if it continued but gosh it had a solid beginning

at least I think that was the story

I haven't read that one! I should read all of these.

it basically has them not do the thing at the end of the movie where Jack lies and says there's nothing left on the other end and so Earth starts doing things on abydos immediately and there's also early contact with the Tollan on much better terms

Thinking about some of my other favourite media... fate is a pretty hostile universe in a lot of ways, but I think it could be good to wind up in one of the AUs were camelot never fell? There's a lot of possibilities for bright futures and nice things there, though it'd probably be pretty weird and you'd want to be surer of the exact metaphysics around the local multiverse than I am...

I've never read Fate — what aspects of the metaphysics would you want to know about, or to quickly check upon arrival?

Mostly you'd want to figure out what's up w/ the timeline culling thing - there's a whole thing with fixed moments of time and divergence and all that. And of course, different AUs can look a little different about that and fate is a bit known for exception based design but well...
Still worrisome!
fate is very nearly a superhero multiverse in terms of just how messy it is, in that sense ^^

Yikes! So we should probably only visit fate after having some protection from timeline effects, even one of the AUs, essentially.

Probably!

I think if you want to go for a low conflict just generally nice world to chill and get services at, I think something like the fixityfieldverse is as good a pick as any?

Also Re Worm CmptrWiz's other major Worm project may well be a better place to live if you don't mind Taylor being the god empress of the universe.
though I agree on Mauling Snarks being pretty far up there and probably what I would pick

Oh — that's ... Hybrid Hive Eat Shard, right? I'd forgotten about that one, but Please Ignore the Secret Kingdom would definitely be a nice place to end up.

hmm... now I'm contemplating Star Wars.
I have so many stories kinda mixed up in my head there
but just in general I would lean towards something where Palestine et al were firmly defeated in the prequel era. Maybe something from the Goa'uld Jedi corner of the multiverse

I feel like star wars isn't a great place to be given the amount of conflict and the existence of various widespread sith empires and stuff like that through a number of onscreen timeline bits... Though I guess you have to have like some trust in that, given that most universes will have plenty of time where they're inhospitable to human life just in general

I mean again we're talking about the best AU of setting X
if I'm trying to pick the best AU in existence that's just too big of a scope

wigglynod

There are Goa'uld Jedi? As in, Jedi who are Goa'uld, or Goa'uld who have posessed Jedi, or ...?

Oh all the Jedi are the Goa'uld species or close to all of them

... huh.

Goa'uld iirc are kind of nastily imperialist? but that might have just been a specific reading of the fanfics I've seen w/ them

nah in canon Stargate they almost universally suck

It's just weird! like, should I be considering the fact that in non-young creation settings that I have a risk of appearing in like, a methane-filled earth or something? Even given that we're picking out a setting, if get in the wrong spot in the timeline things are weird

I don't think that can ... No, it didn't say that, did it? Hold on, let me check some documentation.

... shoot. There's no particular guarantee that we arrive at any particular time or in a hospitable environment. It was heavily implied, but that would have sucked to find out the hard way.

Um.

Let's assume that, for the purposes of this thought exercise, you get immunity to poisons, temperatures, air pressures, gravity, and can jump back to Earth within a few minutes if you end up somewhere completely devoid of life and uninteresting.

That's something, at least!

It is! I'm really glad you brought that up, honestly, because it had not occurred to me.

If we're expecting that you can get dropped in at any time, you might want to have something appealing avaiable whenever? Which I guess makes tech heavier settings a bit less appealing. I'm sure I could fish up some fics with free as in beer systems that give you some nice benefits just for showing up... I'm not sure it changes the math too much about what you want out of a tech setting AU, beyond maybe wanting the timeline to be a bit more decompressed so there's a good chance to find something interesting and good...

Fics with free-as-in-beer benefits for showing up would be pretty good, honestly, especially if those benefits are shareable.

Or I suppose it could be 'any time that's shown on screen', and then you have to like, think about how far they go in loreflashbacks and if those places are any good...

(or inbetween any times shown on screen, or something like that.)

Oh, that raises the thought about AUs with long time-scales, and whether you can extend the times in which you can show up that way ...
Like, most of Basilisk Borne is pre-modern.

ye! Or just like, places w/ weirdly long histories

like iirc a lot of the history in warhammer that's specced out at all is "the eldar empire is generally kind of cool and in ascendancy" I think
so you'd want to optimize general eldar vibes over what's up at 40k, proooobably?

Frankly, I don't really want to touch any variation of Warhammer with a ten-foot pole. But if there are any fics focusing on the older, nicer empires, that's probably still good to know.

Eminently understandable!

...i'm not sure i trust this set of immunities by itself, unless we have more guarantees about which environments we might end up in

if it's just some generic empty interstellar space then i think it would be fine, but something like inside a supernova, or in the area of effect of various kinds of dangerous magic, or even just "in a place that a big rock is about to fall on top of", aren't necessarily safe for someone who's only immune to poisons, temperatures, air pressure and gravity

Sure — the only way to be actually safe is to turtle up and never go exploring. But with the potential upside, I think the risks are worth it.

I guess that's the risk you have to take! Ideally you like, go to a place where you get a system w/ a respawn feature first? I've seen a few fics w/ stuff like that before...

Though not sure ones like that w/ detailed existing AUs

Oh, a Gamer AU with 'New Game Plus' features might actually work pretty well.

resurrection of troubled explorers also isn't out of the question to begin with

this succubus AU is a tad concerning
like it's an improvement on the unaltered wormverse but it's also, uh,

Yeah the reason it stuck in my head was the concerningness!

or go somewhere with a nice afterlife, or a place that has people who will eventually magically resurrect everyone in a sufficiently general way that it would catch you as well if you died (and are also sufficiently nice that you'd be ok with this)

someplace with the important characteristics others have already thought of, and many cute girls? :V

so the problem is that the stories people write tend to have plot, and in real life plot is not really a desirable characteristic

Indeed.

I think I would go to Slim/LOTR AU/postquel The Harrowing; as long as you don't arrive before the au diversion point nearly the only harrowing that happens is people bravely facing their emotions and being kind to each other and trying new flavors of tea
Or, you know, trying and failing to be kind to each other
There's some of that

But if there was any risk of landing too early or on the wrong continent that wouldn't do at all
I don't know how narrowly scoped your travel method is

I feel like there's not a lot a lot of upside in being a rando in most LOTR settings? honestly might be worth seeing if you could make things work out in the In Space! variant or something like that for more opportunities

Oh no this is not providing upside, in my actual real self I would rather enjoy the peace of the Undying Lands than poke the multiversal bees

Just visiting any other setting at all is pretty useful, for trade and learning, regardless of specific benefits.

But yeah, our travel method is annoyingly underspecified. The only steering mechanism we have is to make a universe more like a particular description of it.
Hypothetically.

Hm then that's probably not enough for this to work out
Alas

LOTR does have the advantage of a long timeline where there is frequently not any immediate problems, and an AU that extends into a postquel might help with that.

True! I'm just not sure as no one particularly important I'd want to go to a canon-like LOTR over like, a coffeeshop AU LOTR, which is probably like, the backstop for "if you had to go to an AU of a particular work, where would you go?"
since if you're just a garden variety human or something LOTR is mostly like, a somewhat more dangerous variant of a like, slightly idealized pre-industrial setting, kinda?
Though it's different if you can get the hospitality of the elves or something, or if you want to try to butterfly the plot
but most of the magic people are pretty if not xenophobic but culturally isolated from the 'common folk' think?

I'm not sure how hard it would be to get the hospitality of the elves. It would probably depend a lot on the specific time period and the personal nature of the explorer(s).

yeah

I think I'd pick the version of the Fixipelago that has access to Greater Reality, which is implied to exist in the letter to the omnibenevolence mailing list
though this presupposes that some vast number of possible worlds exist
if there is only the real world plus whatever AU I visit, I'd try to find the AU that has the least suffering and most upside potential

A) That letter is actually from way past the end of Sing by the light here at nightfall.
B) Yes, in this scenario there are a large number of existing worlds.

huh, good to know
in that case I think my choice is the same

Because I am incorrigible egotist, my main questions are A) does the AU need to be a non-trivial AU or is 'just as things were in canon' acceptable, and B) what level of obscurity for the source material of the AU is acceptable?
I ask these things because I'm wondering if any of my stories/MYCs might qualify as destinations.

it needs to be an AU, but it can be an AU of an obscure thing
the question we're trying to get at goes something like: if you were faced with a fictional world and had your choice of AUs of that fictional world to go to, what are some AUs that strike you as particularly much better than their source material?

Do "I made the worldbuilding much more functional" AUs count. Do I even want to go to [setting but with more correct worldbuilding] as a generalised operation?

I would tentatively rather live in a setting with functional worldbuilding, because then my instincts about how the world works are closer to true
But not if that came with significant downsides like "historically accurate misery", no
"Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies" is a canonical AO3 tag with 55k works; if I had to pick a tag to (accurately) apply to a world I was living in? that one doesn't capture everything I might want but I think it's a good start 

hmm, but i suspect that that's "canon characters saved from death" not "death itself dismantled" in most cases

Yes, I still think it's a good start? Assuming the canon characters are relevantly non-evil, to save the canon characters means blunting various bad effects, bad luck, depowering villains, etc
Not always but a lot of the time

Yeah very few people use that tag to mean "the protagonists are suspended in a hellish life from which there will be no escape" and I think if they did many people would be annoyed at their misleading tag selection

Does the fact that two of my settings are mutually AUs of each other make either of them count

Yes, it makes both of them count.

What settings are they, and which of the two would you rather visit?

They're the settings of my Mage-Recruit and Dating Dragons MYCs, respectively.
The difference being "what happened to the Deviser," the hypercosmic being who created the universe for reasons.
In Mage-Recruit, their argument was complete but rejected (or rather, was never acknowledged), which caused a cascading failure of its components and for the doubt/failure to resonate within all of them, interfering with future self-repair attempts. This event shaped much of the hyperterrain of Earth's local macrocosm, as well as causing Earth's universe to undergo the particular cosmological evolution that it did.

In Dating Dragons, they were interrupted before they could assemble the argument's components, and so they're scattered about the hyperterrain, but in a largely undamaged state. This also results in Earth's universe following a similar history, including an almost perfect overlap of recorded history on Earth itself.
I think I'd probably prefer to be in Dating Dragons, overall, though in both cases without any control over when in the timeline I appear there's a good chance I show up during the stone age and just have to suck it up.