Hello, I'll be your bunny for today

Two more (related) fanfic bunnies:

2013 Lara Croft looks for Atlantis instead of Yamatai.  This is not the story you'd think at first glance. The 2013 reboot is somewhat more realistic but certainly more gritty than the original (or Anniversary remake) story. More so, the character and arc presented in the 2013 reboot is far from the person Natla would have hired.

So take it that one step further. The thing I've loved about the reboot Lara -- as much as the actual games largely fail to deliver -- is that she is an actual academic. She's a professionally trained archaeologist, not a treasure hunter. Plus of course she has (as she discovers in the game) remarkable depths of endurance and determination.

So change the entire Atlantis setup until it becomes something that a college student could reasonably be sucked into. Discover it not as a great adventure by a skilled adventuress, but as a completely unexpected and world-changing discovery made during an ordinary excavation.



2013 Croft (yes, that's the theme of this pair of bunnies. Sorry.) discovers the Stargate. Sorta. You have to change the Stargate universe significantly, not just to make it a story the, again, college student just starting out and unsure of her strengths Lara would fall into, but because having the whole Stargate Command thing already happening is to me not as interesting a story. So it's a rewrite there, too. The Stargate is still buried in Giza.

Or is in a warehouse outside of DC, because once you've changed one canon that far, why not change the other...that Lara's dad played the Ernest Littlefield role, the circumstances of his disappearance were covered up by the government, and, yeah, Ra is still out there.




Sigh. That's one of the downsides of learning to write. You start seeing story elements as little gears and pulleys you can re-arrange. And some pieces are like that block in the Tetris world; just so easy to fit into anything you want to keep reaching for it -- even as everyone else has already done the same. That's how well-used furniture and worn-out tropes and stock characters keep coming back and back. It is too easy to think in mechanics, not in the complexities of life. Too easy to go "Say, why don't I just add a spoiled princess here; she could tell them about the magic sword then...."

Associated with that is the urge to tinker. To take a work that someone else has produced and try to fix it. Or just shake it up and see what happens differently. What if Paris had taken Athena's bribe instead? (I bet it still would have worked out badly for Troy). What if the Ten Thousand hadn't stood down when they got word that Cyrus was dead (still probably in a world of hurt after the heirs of Artaxerxes got their shit together.

From such exercises comes alternate histories, sequels...and fanfic.