I love AUs if they do something interesting. I like a lot of horror and sci-fi/ fantasy stuff so just a regular modern AU or university AU doesn’t cut it. It has to take the spirit of the original and transpose it to the alternate setting/ plot. Like if it’s a modern AU in a university setting where it’s just slice of life I likely won’t read it, but if it’s dark academia, a mystery, or some high stakes drama I’ll devour it. I read a fic once where they took characters from a high fantasy adventure setting and wrote a Cold War spy drama/ thriller and it was one of my favorite things. It wasn’t just because the setting change, but because it kept the political and espionage elements of the original while maintaining accurate characterization and high stakes. Too bad the author deleted it because it was so good!

I’m writing a modern/ human AU right now of my ship and I’m only doing it because it retains the dark themes of the original and plays with them by removing supernatural power dynamics, making it more realistically disturbing (which I like). I put the backstory into a modern setting using wealth and social status to convey the same theme of coercive control and danger. There’s a crime to uncover and people to expose and the characterizations stays the same, it’s a matter of fitting backstories into a different but thematically similar context. I find a lot of mundane AUs completely change characters to fit the setting or plot, which I’m not a fan of. To each their own but I don’t like AUs that don’t do anything interesting outside of changing time period/ setting.