I love how in the homestuck fandom, “stuck” has become a synonymous suffix for ‘AU’. Want an au that takes place in college? collegestuck. Want an au that’s sad and angsty? sadstuck. Want an AU that takes place in the harry potter universe? potterstuck. Just add ’-stuck’ at the end and you got yourself an AU™
honestly it’s the hardest thing not to drag the terminology into other fandoms, because —stuck is much more efficient a labeling convention.
‘au’ just indicates something about the fanfic is different from canon, and it could be anything from a minor plot deviation to a genderswap to a wild west retelling to a crossover. so you have to actually use a couple words or even a whole phrase. ‘everyone’s at hogwarts AU’, ‘biker gang AU’, ‘abducted by aliens AU’, ‘AU from this canon event where that character made another decision’. it’s clumsy.
conversely, the ‘stuck suffix indicates that something major about the setting or characters has been changed, with the prefix indicating what, such as collegestuck, humanstuck, demonstuck, knightstuck, treckstuck. the exceptions that sort of prove the rule are ‘stucks that indicate a genre shift such as sadstuck and horrorstuck. you get a short, snappy compound term that conveys the basic premise of your story and off you go.
it really is awfully useful, as are the troll romance quadrants. if i say “i ship pidge and hunk pale” you know i don’t just mean they’re friends, i mean they’re in a platonic but extremely close relationship involving lots of supportiveness and squishy bro feels. it’s hard to write a story about ‘these two are friends’ because like… so what? everyone’s got a dozen friends. but it’s easy to write a story about a pale ship, because that is fraught with motherfuckin feels.
People can say what they like about the Homestuck fandom (and they will probably be right lbr) but it has yielded a number of really CHOICE concepts for transformative works that I have never seen the like of in any other fandom.
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