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This is related to a discussion in another lj, but I realized it was really a tangent, so I thought I'd put it here. The discussion was about all-human AUs, where fanfic authors take non-human characters and make them human due to the setting. For instance, if you have everybody from Star Trek in high school, Spock might be an exchange student from some other country, but he's not half Vulcan. Likewise, Castiel isn't an angel, Spike isn't a vampire, Frodo isn't a hobbit, Zuko isn't a fire bender, etc. It's taking fantasy or sci-fi characters and putting them in a real world settings. Many people don't really see the point in that--which I can understand, even if I like those stories. If a character has an alien mindset, the logical question is, how can s/he be the same character without that alien mindset?
Which led me to an answer that's not really relevent to that discussion, which is
...that they're actually human to begin with. In the context of the original discussion, of course they aren't. Castiel's foreign-ness as an angel is a huge part of his character and you really do go down the wrong path if you try to understand him as one of the human characters so, for instance, his devotion to God's orders is something he should have gotten over. Same goes for all those other characters.
But at the same time, these are all characters that come out of the head of a human, and humans really don't have the ability to conceive of a completely foreign mindset. We can do pretty well with our imaginations because human imagination is pretty impressive, but it's still limited by our own perceptions. I remember reading once, for instance, about this as applied to animals. Animals are other beings with which humans actually live, yet they're so foreign we can't conceive of what their perception is like. We can't help but often talk about them in human terms. Even if you know intellectually that your dog or cat isn't experiencing the world the way you are, it's hard to not understand many of his/her actions in somewhat human terms. The real pov of a cat is beyond human conception, period. Even books that are praised for the way they create a unique animal pov are anthropomorphizing them. At the very least, we give them language, even if its not a spoken language, and that alone is a bigger change than human to vampire right there.
Angels, demons, vampires, aliens, do have language which solves that problem. Their brains aren't foreign the way an animals are. Yet they do in the same way start with a human pov. The pov, for instance, of being immortal and defining good as "following God's orders" is alien to the way humans live, but it still has a human starting point. It's asking you to imagine what it would be like to be a person who has lived for millions of years etc. Which is why Castiel's actions, even if he's an angel, can be argued on human terms. If "but he's an angel" *only* meant that his actions were completely foreign the character would have no interest to us whatsoever because we couldn't relate to him at all. The interest is generated (if it's generated for you) in the combination of the familiar and unfamiliar. We can't truly understand what his pov is like because we could never live for millions of years, but we can safely relate to his feelings of conflict as what we understand to be "feelings of conflict" if that makes sense. Iow, when Castiel looks like he's intrigued by Dean's ability to think for himself, he actually is intrigued by that. We can use our experience of life as humans to understand the angels' actions as long as we have the right information.
So if you took Castiel and plunked him into a high school AU, he would not be the same character. You would lose the exaggerated quality of his isolation, for instance. For many people he would, understandably, cease to be Castiel. But to another person it would be enough that he had the human version of that conflict just by being a person who has trouble thinking for himself.
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jlh just wrote a Star Trek AU where Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Spock are roommates together at Harvard in 1959 (hee!). Spock isn't half-alien (at least not the extra terrestrial kind; McCoy's mother from Georgia might say he might as well be), but in the decades that follow his most important decision still comes down to feelings vs. logic, with Spock defaulting to logic and Bones arguing for emotion. There's enough there to make him completely recognizable as Spock even if you believe he can't truly be Spock without being half-Vulcan. You'd probably still find him more IC than a half-Vulcan Spock who behaved like Bones because he'd rejected the Vulcan way.
I guess this is why for me seeing a fantasy character turned into a human one doesn't always seem like they're a different character, because there are no characters anywhere that don't have a human lurking somewhere inside them. This is not to say I don't appreciate the idea of a character given an alien pov--I do, and often wind up arguing when I feel like it's being dismissed. It's just that I think when we say a character has an alien pov we must mean "imagine if your human pov was artificially distorted along these lines" rather than "this character is completely foreign from the ground up."
Basically, the topic just interests me because it's one of those brain breaking things to try to imagine a perspective completely different to the human perspective when we have no point of reference to be able to do that.
Which led me to an answer that's not really relevent to that discussion, which is
...that they're actually human to begin with. In the context of the original discussion, of course they aren't. Castiel's foreign-ness as an angel is a huge part of his character and you really do go down the wrong path if you try to understand him as one of the human characters so, for instance, his devotion to God's orders is something he should have gotten over. Same goes for all those other characters.
But at the same time, these are all characters that come out of the head of a human, and humans really don't have the ability to conceive of a completely foreign mindset. We can do pretty well with our imaginations because human imagination is pretty impressive, but it's still limited by our own perceptions. I remember reading once, for instance, about this as applied to animals. Animals are other beings with which humans actually live, yet they're so foreign we can't conceive of what their perception is like. We can't help but often talk about them in human terms. Even if you know intellectually that your dog or cat isn't experiencing the world the way you are, it's hard to not understand many of his/her actions in somewhat human terms. The real pov of a cat is beyond human conception, period. Even books that are praised for the way they create a unique animal pov are anthropomorphizing them. At the very least, we give them language, even if its not a spoken language, and that alone is a bigger change than human to vampire right there.
Angels, demons, vampires, aliens, do have language which solves that problem. Their brains aren't foreign the way an animals are. Yet they do in the same way start with a human pov. The pov, for instance, of being immortal and defining good as "following God's orders" is alien to the way humans live, but it still has a human starting point. It's asking you to imagine what it would be like to be a person who has lived for millions of years etc. Which is why Castiel's actions, even if he's an angel, can be argued on human terms. If "but he's an angel" *only* meant that his actions were completely foreign the character would have no interest to us whatsoever because we couldn't relate to him at all. The interest is generated (if it's generated for you) in the combination of the familiar and unfamiliar. We can't truly understand what his pov is like because we could never live for millions of years, but we can safely relate to his feelings of conflict as what we understand to be "feelings of conflict" if that makes sense. Iow, when Castiel looks like he's intrigued by Dean's ability to think for himself, he actually is intrigued by that. We can use our experience of life as humans to understand the angels' actions as long as we have the right information.
So if you took Castiel and plunked him into a high school AU, he would not be the same character. You would lose the exaggerated quality of his isolation, for instance. For many people he would, understandably, cease to be Castiel. But to another person it would be enough that he had the human version of that conflict just by being a person who has trouble thinking for himself.
Likewise,
jlh just wrote a Star Trek AU where Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Spock are roommates together at Harvard in 1959 (hee!). Spock isn't half-alien (at least not the extra terrestrial kind; McCoy's mother from Georgia might say he might as well be), but in the decades that follow his most important decision still comes down to feelings vs. logic, with Spock defaulting to logic and Bones arguing for emotion. There's enough there to make him completely recognizable as Spock even if you believe he can't truly be Spock without being half-Vulcan. You'd probably still find him more IC than a half-Vulcan Spock who behaved like Bones because he'd rejected the Vulcan way.I guess this is why for me seeing a fantasy character turned into a human one doesn't always seem like they're a different character, because there are no characters anywhere that don't have a human lurking somewhere inside them. This is not to say I don't appreciate the idea of a character given an alien pov--I do, and often wind up arguing when I feel like it's being dismissed. It's just that I think when we say a character has an alien pov we must mean "imagine if your human pov was artificially distorted along these lines" rather than "this character is completely foreign from the ground up."
Basically, the topic just interests me because it's one of those brain breaking things to try to imagine a perspective completely different to the human perspective when we have no point of reference to be able to do that.
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It makes me think, for instance, of the idea of somebody writing an AU about Harry Potter where he's not a wizard. They could certainly make a case for saying that they're looking at how different his life would have been in that case, but my main response to the idea would still be: why?
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I'm enjoying this discussion a lot, btw - it's making me realise more clearly just how many things are bound up in a character for me, including thematic aspects.
I don't think I'd have much of a problem with a non-magical HP AU, but then I'd need to think about it some more, I guess, since Harry himself isn't generally at the front of my mind when I think of HP. How essential is the magic to his character, really? Hm. (I'd be interested in your view, if you don't mind explaining - what is it about him being a wizard that's so fundamental for you?)
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But as I talk about it, I can think of ways around that easily. It would be interesting, for instance, to read an AU short story where he's not a wizard but it's still commenting on the canon story. In fact, I think of stuff like that with Bat-characters all the time where, for instance, I can imagine an AU where the superhero Bats meet versions of themselves that didn't become superheroes because they never met Bruce, for instance. And an HP AU could also come up with some reason that Muggle!Harry did meet the wizard characters--or human versions of the wizard characters.
So I've now pretty much even talked myself out of my original position--for reasons I think go back to your original point. Harry's view of himself as "wizard" isn't really fundamental to his character because it's not a pov so much as a power and the reason he knows the people he knows.
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(Btw, I ended up rereading your Castiel meta from the other day last night and didn't manage to comment before I fell asleep. I've actually watched SPN now, partially thanks to your post, and what you say rings completely true to me.)
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I'm really not sure how you can say "far cry from how this trope is mostly approached". Sturgeon Law applies to everything equally, Tropes are not Bad, etc.
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I didn't mean that in a quality sense, just that the approach to the AU is different from most.
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