Thread by @mashazart

Has anyone written any good meta about the rise of Twitter social media AUs and how that differs from chatfics and other methods of storytelling

I checked fanlore but there's NOTHING on there probably bc socmed aus are written by teenagers and most ppl who use fanlore are older
like. I searched outcast and got a Kirk/spock fic
The BTS outcast hashtag trended WORLDWIDE for 5 days straight last year A MILLION ppl read it

I'm not even exaggerating the tweets have since been deleted but billboard.com/articles/colum…

The thing abt social media AUs is you have to pretend everyone involved is now the type of person to live the details of their life publicly on Twitter at least to an extent when that's not even how everyone uses Twitter irl
so you have to accept a level of OOC behavior

but also it's a format that doesn't allow for a lot of exposition which makes it easier to just jump in but at the same time it'd be hard to get ppl invested in a story about original characters told in this format

"has anyone written the meta," I ask, before writing the meta myself

HOW DIFFERENT WOULD HOMESTUCK HAVE BEEN IF INSTEAD OF EARLY 2000S INTERNET NOSTALGIC CHAT CLIENTS THE WHOLE STORY WAS TOLD THROUGH A TWITTER THREAD AND INSTA/SNAP SCREENSHOTS like that extracanon bit they did at one point

HI I HAVE MORE THOUGHTS ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA AUS
something I've noticed is a lot of the authors of such AUs use the protag's twitter accts to show what they're really thinking abt each other vs their actual interactions

and to do that the two main characters can't be mutuals
so it's always an AU where some of the canon cast of characters is friends with person A and the other half is friends with person B and it's interesting how ppl decide to break up the canon group

idk anything abt kpop but I read some bits of kpop socmed AUs in an attempt to Understand and primary diff btw that and anime AUs I've noticed is: more photos of ppl and a different tone for how ppl text
I'm guessing kpop stars have public social media accts ppl use as insp?

like we can only guess how miyuki kazuya would tweet (altho my personal onion is, He Wouldn't) but real people with real twitter accounts have something for you to go off of

IT'S JUST SO INTERESTING TO ME IDK

OH OH OH ALSO kpop socmed AUs have way higher rates of interaction on their made-up tweets than I'm used to seeing ever is that a. stantwt thing or something
like why would 20 ppl RT something saying "we have arrived" when they're not famous in this AU

as a non-kpoppie I find it a lot harder to follow kpop socmed AUs than reading a fanfic for a thing I'm not familiar with which I think supports my theory that this format is unsustainable for OC stories
I don't know who any of these ppl are or what their Personalities are

and a social media AU often like, smushes character's personalities into the stantwt-user mold so the AU could exist at all
reticient characters MUST share their emotions on twitter so the readers know what they're feeling even if they wouldn't in canon

and few if any characters have distinct typing styles/unique usage of emoji/kaomoji/emoticons which reminds me of homestuck again where that was The Whole Feature

there's this one twitter AU I can't stop thinking about bc it took Furuya who in canon is a) fairly quiet, if blunt and b) has one brain cell, dedicated entirely to baseball
and made him talkative and like, intentionally sarcastic and mean in a way he isn't canonically

and it was funny! it was very funny
but not how furuya would use twitter. furuya would be extremely terrible at twitter I think

WAIT WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT CHECK PLEASE TOO
OMGCP in the early days had a canon Twitter account by bitty that was updated with the comic and ppl incorporated that into their fics, both AU and canon compliant

But maybe bc the program for fake twt screenshots didn't exist yet or it was too hard to do or smth ppl just had text-only twts in fanfics sometimes and called it a multimedia fic

I'm not active in the checkplease fandom rn so idk if ppl are out there making zimbits socmed AUs but it was like an early version of The Twitter AU but in a more realistic and grounded way
Like how Jack gets into Twitter bc of bitty and how bitty uses socmed for diff reasons

OH IT'S BECAUSE THE PPL WRITING CHECK PLEASE FICS (at least the fics I'm thinking of) ARE ADULTS AND THE PPL MAKING AUS ON TWITTER ARE USUALLY TEENS/YOUNGER ADULTS

Like here's what a checkplease fic using Twitter in 2017 looks like if you're not familiar
This is how ppl incorporated Twitter into storytelling before Twitter AUs became a Thing
(The fic is archiveofourown.org/works/9143275/… and I like it)

Notice the lack of memes/ Stan Twt Language and lack of images reaction or otherwise
You get the sense these characters are adults and also that the Twitter exchange is serving a purpose in the narrative rather than being the entire narrative

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