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High School AU / Fan Works

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High School AU in Fan Works.

  • Avamorphs combines this with a Transplanted Character Fic featuring the main characters of Avatar: The Last Airbendernote  in the Animorphs universe. Bending doesn't exist and they seem to live in a generic American town (albeit where everyone has Avatar-world names).
  • A Princess, a Treehugger, and a Space Cadet Walk Into a Library is an Animorphs high school AU which loosely parallels the plot of The Breakfast Club. Ax is a Funny Foreigner instead of an alien.
  • A chapter of All Assorted Animorphs AUs puts the Animorphs in the shoes of the Ouran High School Host Club characters.
  • Common in the Arcane fandom, usually with some of the class conflict elements of the show transposed to a high school setting.
  • The existence of the official High School AU Attack on Titan: Junior High may be a reference to the extreme popularity of this in the Attack on Titan fanbase. This is likely due to the fact that Attack On Titan has a sort of school camaraderie dynamic in the early chapters when the characters are all still part of the 104th Trainees, but it gets quickly broken as soon as they're official members of the Survey Corps, and the brutal world they live in starts killing them and/or pitting them against each other. High school AUs are a way to preserve that earlier dynamic and keep things fluffy.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender: This Fan Fic. As the name implies, he's running for Prom King.
  • Gotham High. Not unlike the unproduced cartoon series (and page art at the top), the video reimagines Batman (mainly The Dark Knight Trilogy) as a Teen Comedy in the vein of another High School AU, 10 Things I Hate About You (the main source of the video).
  • The Ben 10 fanfic series Hero High by Mr. Evil. Three entire books first taking place in an Alien School, then in a normal one, and finally a school the size of a city. He is also currently writing one in a Generator Rex universe.
  • There is one fanfiction of The Bible. Even the summary says, "Anything can be a High School AU fic. ANYTHING." It also has Ebony from My Immortal in it. She even has the bad spelling from her original fan fic to go with her.
  • The Big Bang Theory has The New School Adjustment, which reimagines the characters as teenagers with Leonard having recently moved to Los Angeles.
  • An arc in the fanfic Bond Breaker involves this, with the main character Shade and a bunch of people he'd met on his journey transplanted into an AU high school setting. A lot of the girls he's met seem to be in love with him, as well... much to his annoyance.
  • A large portion of The Boondocks fanfics take place a few years in the future when the main characters are in high school.
  • "Old School New Revolution" takes the cast of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command and places them in high school in the 1980s.
  • High School fics are also very popular for Codename: Kids Next Door. The better ones focus on the fact that their memories are wiped when they turn 13, and often getting them back.
  • Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi can be summarized by this trope, but for nearly every Cartoon Network original series created (except with elementary schoolers). Aside from the titular Powerpuff Girls, major characters include Dexter, Tootie, and Samurai Jack (as a teacher). That's merely scratching the surface, though; there are plenty more ShoutOuts as background or side characters.
  • Very popular for Death Note fanfics, although just as often, it's a college A.U. Either way, it qualifies as a Fandom-Specific Plot.
  • In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, the Assassins' Guild School (and to a lesser extent the Thieves' Guild School and the Convent School of Seven-Handed Sek) are productive settings for fiction; involving both the pupils and their long-suffering educators.
  • There's a bunch of Disney Animated Canon High School AU fics out there, such as Disney High, with some being better than others. Don Bluth characters tend to appear as the typical rivals from another high school.
  • While there aren't many fanfics about the game, the amount of fan art of Dissidia Final Fantasy portraying the characters as high school students is really outstanding, both in the eastern and western sides of the fandom.
  • The ER fanfic "Cook County High" (as opposed to Hospital). Obviously, the characters weren't saving lives in this setting, but their characterizations were kept intact.
  • Horrible Turn, the fan-prequel to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.
  • H.G. Wells High School is a metafictional Doctor Who fanfic setting, with all the Doctors in different years, and the appropriate supporting cast at the appropriate age. Newman Primary is the same thing, but as a primary school (elementary school in the US). There's also a retirement home, with elderly versions of the characters, but it's a bit *too* much for people, so it doesn't get used much. The most popular alternate-age versions of the characters remain the Spinoff Babies of the Look Who's Talking day care centre. All of them co-exist in the wider setting of This Time Round.
  • Skyhold Academy Yearbook takes the cast of Dragon Age: Inquisition and drops them into a modern boarding school scenario which the authors describe as "non-magical Hogwarts with random musical numbers." However, most of the Inquisition members are teachers, not students.
  • Frozen: Multiple:
    • Fans prefer writing college fanfics as they keep the characters' ages the same, and adult characters have more freedom than teenagers. A large number of them just happen to be Elsa/Anna fics, though usually with them being unrelated instead of sisters. High school AUs aren't uncommon either.
    • A mild example occurs in A Snowflake In Spring. Though Anna and several other characters do attend high school, only a small part of the story is actually set there. Far more of the plot is centered around the Arendelle Institute for the Emotionally Disturbed, where both "Ice Queen" Elsa and Anna's brother Hans are being treated.
    • Café Liégeois uses Anna and Elsa being college students as a backdrop for the plot. They don't actually spend time in school but there are references to their school work here and there. Anna is an art major while Elsa is an architect major (despite being blind, which surprises people).
  • Fullmetal Alchemist: Due to the complete and utter impossibility of the EdxEnvy pairing, most of the stand-out fanfics for them are High School AUs. These include The Seven Names of Envy Angevin, Side by Side and the sadly defunct Stupid Cupid
  • There is now a fan-parody High School AU for Game of Thrones titled, appropriately, School Of Thrones, complete with a cool opening that mimics the already awesome credits of the TV series (the parody seems more in debt to the show than the books.) Features the Starks as hipsters, the Lannisters as the "cool" gang that runs the school, the Greyjoys as the swim team, Daenerys as the dragon-obsessed foreign exchange student, Renly as the quarterback and potential prom king candidate (with Loras as his prom queen), and Stannis and Melisandre as Mormons. Incredibly silly and a bit cringeworthy but still some good fun, can be found here.
  • Since Glee already takes place at a high school, fanfic writers have found ways of twisting this trope to make it interesting. College AUs are quite common, where characters who according to canon know each other in high school don't meet until college.
  • You would think that Harry Potter, being set in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and populated almost entirely by teenagers, would be exempt from this. Nope. For some reason, there are a number of fics where Harry and company end up at a (usually) American high school. Expect Draco to be in leather pants. And you can make Snape, Sirius and co into high school students by writing a prequel fanfic.
  • Heroes has a few High School AU fics that attempt to transplant the premise of "ordinary people with extraordinary abilities" into high school. Mostly this is done to make Peter and Claire closer in age and not related.
  • There are High School A.U. works of, believe it or not, High School Musical. It boggles the mind that anyone, especially a shipper, would take a high-school setting filled to the brim with Ho Yay, Les Yay, Foe Yay Shipping and every other kind of yay you can imagine (not to mention all the other shipping tropes HSM is prone to) and think to themselves "Let's change the school, the characters' personalities, and their love-interests".
  • Homestuck:
    • The fanfic "Bright Eyes", and true to the spirit of a High School AU, it Mundanizes the setting by turning the troll characters into humans with ordinary parents, coming from "Alternian High" rather than the planet Alternia.
    • Promstuck is another Homestuck High School AU and is fairly well regarded in the fandom. Unlike the above there is no Mundanization of the characters- all the non-humans are kept non-human.
    • Paradox Space also has an official/unofficial version called Damara.
    • There's also the infamous Homestuck high that starts out as one, and rapidly falls into insanity.
  • Invader Zim has many set in "Hi Skool," though they're usually framed as sequels rather than A Us. Expect Zim to be as tall as the teenage humans now and romantically involved with Dib, Gaz or an Original Character.
  • Pick a Jane Austen novel, any one from Pride and Prejudice to Persuasion. In the fanfiction archives at least 75% of the stories will take place in a modern day, often American high school.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • There are high school AU fics out there, taking away the characters' powers and the like.
    • There are actually some that have the Power Trio (Sora, Riku and Kairi) attending school after the events of the second game, and have them pretty much keep their powers. This may be based on the fact Kairi and Selphie appear in school uniforms near the beginning of the game, suggesting that the two missing will likely have to attend once they return.
    • Some of the straight-up AUs make it work quite well.
    • High School AUs are hilariously (albeit scathingly) parodied in the second and third chapters of Those Lacking Spines.
    • If I Was Your Nazi looks like it's not an example... until you realize that for all the WWII Germany trappings, the characters act like they're in high school.
    • There is a popular series of Sora/Riku doujins set in high school.
  • Dreamland University Redux is a Kirby college AU fic with nearly all of the main cast in college.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
  • Loads and loads of Lyrical Nanoha fics have the cast as normal High School students; despite how canonly, they did go to High School together, and on Earth even. It's those pesky magic powers and the personalities that come along with them that get in the way.
  • The number of these for The Lord of the Rings is disturbing. Possibly a variation with The Official Fanfiction University Of Middle-earth and its variants; in these, the canon characters are the teachers, and are teaching normal human students how their universe canonically works.
  • The Marvel Cinematic Universe fanfiction Allerleirauh is a rather unique example of a High School AU, in that the Avengers are all actually the same individuals from The Avengers (2012), just deaged back to infants by some supervillain, and raised (mostly) normally until they start regaining their powers, skills, and memories once they turn sixteen. From there on out, there's not much high school.
  • The number for Maximum Ride is disturbingly high. But that's kind of the point of School's Out — Forever.
  • Megamind was subjected to this. The first was Fate (although its true status as a High School AU is debatable), and soon others were following in its footsteps. That's probably not even all of them.
  • Naruto:
  • Nintendo:
  • Pokémon:
    • There is an inordinately large number of Pokémon: The Series and Pokémon Adventures high school and middle school fics out there. Some are gracious enough to leave the Pokémon in (some are even set in a school for Pokémon trainers, which have been shown to exist), but just as many dispense with them altogether, rendering the title of the franchise meaningless. It's not even known if traditional schools exist in the series (though adaptations like How I Became a Pokémon Card imply they do).
    • A Miscellaneous Tale of Night and Day, a Pokémon Adventures fanfic, takes this to the next level. Instead of being a cheesy romance Fan Fic, it takes a huge turn and speeds into a whole new direction. Not wanting another overused school fic, the author sets things to a different pace with the oh-so-loved Rule of Funny, but not without the romance, of course. A Romantic Comedy AU, now giving the comedy the main role other than the romance. Along with dashes of Darker and Edgier and mystery along the way.
    • We Are Only School Students is a crossover comic between the anime and Pokémon Adventures manga. It is set 200 years in the future from the main canon and features reincarnations of the cast. Pokémon have gone extinct and, worse of all, no one remembers their existence. After an incident, all memory of Pocket Monsters has been erased from history. It's up to a group of teenagers to fix this... But, the comic takes a long time to get to this plot and spends the first few chapters just being a generic school AU.
  • The Powerpuff Girls fanworks almost always age the girls up to high school age. More Than Human is an on-going example.
  • Rainbow Brite and the Color Kids is an animesque comic of Rainbow Brite where Rainbow starts out as a 2010s Ordinary High-School Student before becoming a Magical Girl.
  • Broadly, this is the most common setting for Reader Insert Fics, as they are usually written and read by teenage girls and so are made to be relatable.
  • Recess has a ton of High School and College AU fics, more-so than fics taking place during the show.
  • The Rise of the Guardians fanfiction The Coldest And The Boldest has all the protagonists from the film in high school. It's also somewhat of a crossover, as there are characters such as Rapunzel, Pan, Hiccup, and Astrid who appear as cameos or side characters.
  • RWBY:
    • Given that RWBY is already in a school setting it's easy for fans to remove the more fantastical elements and present them in a normal high school environment (or rarer, college). Some fanworks keep them in the same universe but don't have the characters decide to become Hunters.
    • Fates Collide is set in the RWBY universe, but adds characters from Fate/Grand Order and sets them up as students, teachers, and staff for Chaldea Academy. It's a school that teaches them to slay Grimm, but still a school.
  • Back during its heyday, Sailor Moon spawned hundreds of these. The (inner) sailors were almost always in a band, camp counselors, or even just regular high school girls. Mamoru/Darien and the four generals would invariably be a rival band, the male counselors, or in their class—once in a great while, the "civilian" boys such as Urawa/Greg and Motoki/Andrew would be Mamoru/Darien's team. About the only things that would tie the stories to Sailor Moon would be the names and basic personalities of the characters; otherwise, there would be no real way to tell a story was supposed to be about Sailor Moon at all. Of course, since the stories were just vehicles for shipping, having the senshi actually be senshi would probably have just distracted from the romance.
  • A fairly popular (if unimaginatively named) fic for Samurai Deeper Kyo is available. The story seems to ignore the high school setting in favor of whatever bizarre plot seems funny. Shipping is kept to a minimum, since the story has two authors who don't agree on pairings and therefore wildly sabotage each other's plots, once using an explicit All Just a Dream plot.
  • There is a significant amount of Sherlock Holmes high school AU stories, both as professional novels and as traditional fanfiction. The Irregulars is one of the better examples.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Infamous fanfiction Sonic High School is a prime example of this done horribly wrong but brilliantly at the same time.
    • The number of Sonic the Hedgehog fanfics that have this as a basic premise is insane. And very few of them even give a simple explanation of the sudden change, and go about as if nothing was different. Those that do often give the explanation of "Chaos Control sent them there".
    • Shadow the Hedgehog - First Class is an AU where Shadow is adopted by Gerald and raised as Maria's brother. Shadow begins going to a mixed human/mobian school, though there's a culture clash both because he's an artificial hedgehog and because he's been raised by humans.
  • About two out of every three South Park fanfics take place when the boys are in high school, and many of the rest take place during middle school or adulthood. This probably has something to do with the fact that 99% of South Park fanfics focus on the characters' love lives.
  • As Splatoon stars 14-year-olds who just happen to like playing a glorified version of paint tag, references school, and even has school uniforms as clothing, there are more than a few fanworks starring the writer's OCs as middle- or high-schoolers. Idol characters, like Callie or Marina, are more likely to get the college AU treatment instead due to being older than the player avatar, but aging them down to high school isn't uncommon.
  • More than one Star Trek high school AU has graced the internet, but a noteworthy example is the collaborative roleplay high school AU starting here at Star Trek_Diary. It features the crew of the Enterprise (based on their 2009 actors) attending Enterprise Academy, a prep school for Starfleet Academy, with Star Trek: The Original Series characters as teachers, other adults, and side characters, and occasional mention of Star Trek: The Next Generation characters at the local kindergarten. Text is sometimes NSFW, full of horny teenagers with issues, and contains everything from pants-stealing aliens to evil twins, sex pollen, and the mafia. Expect many actor crossover references.
  • Star Wars:
    • Professional comic book artist and illustrator Denis Medri gives us "If Star Wars was Set in an 80s High School". See it here.
    • leading by example by serenfyrr is one for The Force Awakens, with student council members Rey, Finn, and Poe competing in a talent show against the First Order kids. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • There's a popular trend of high school fics which ignore the canon continuity entirely. Generally they place Jack and Daniel as foster brothers, Sam as the girl next door, and Teal'c as the weird new kid from Africa. Never mind that they weren't all in high school at the same time, and Teal'c's an alien.
    • Some fanfics have O'Neill's clone end up at the same high school as Dr. Fraiser's adopted (alien) daughter Cassandra.
  • Steven Universe works featuring the Gems as humans in college aren't uncommon. Usually Steven is left out due to the fact the Gems would need to be older than the typical under-30 college student to know him, though occasionally Rose Quartz is an older friend or professor who has him as a young son.
  • The Story of Seasons series has seen an upsurge in High School AU Fanfics, the most extensive of which being this one, now over fifty chapters. Since then, several have cropped up, such as this, this, and this.
  • RE Marios High School Days is a high school version of Super Mario Bros..
  • Super Robot Wars High takes place in a High School with the entire cast of every Super Robot Wars game ever, both Anime and Original Generation characters. Currently discontinued, but was written as an attempt to prove the plot and setting of an SRW universe could be retained with a school setting forming the core of the plot.
  • There are a ridiculous amount of Teen Titans (2003) high school AU stories. All of them usually will have their civilian names from the comics (Robin may be Dick Grayson or Tim Drake or just Robin). Usually parody fics end up making fun of the extreme amount of High School AUs, and their lack of logic (culminating in a dance).
  • There are countless Total Drama fics that place the characters in a high school setting instead of a reality show competition, which makes complete sense given the characters are all sixteen-year-olds and the series contains elements parodying Teen Dramas. The character dynamics usually tend to be identical to the show's, with many of the same friendships, rivalries, and romances that existed on the island.
  • Downplayed in the The Owl House fanfic There's No One Like You. While it's tagged as such on Archive of Our Own, and a good portion of the school is set at Hexside High School, just as much if not more takes place at home, dealing with Luz and Amity's families.
  • Touhou Project:
    • There are many doujins (of varying quality) that put Marisa and co .in high school. For some reason, Keine and/or Eirin (and/or Eiki!) are almost always put in a position of authority (teacher or principal) while Mokou is a delinquent. There is also an inversion of this trope: Keine (see a pattern?) set up a school for the kids of Gensokyo.
    • One also subverts them: It seems that high school is the normalcy... until Reimu realizes that it's the working of the resident Reality Warper Yukari Yakumo. Then she returns to being the normal ass-kicking miko, while the world is not yet un-warped.
    • Until Sumireko's introduction, Sanae was for a long time the only character in the series who actually was a high school student. Surprisingly little is done with this, aside from fanart of her in a school uniform.
    • For a specific example, there's the Slice of Life fan comic Four Seasons Housenote . Unlike many examples, the characters aren't all in the same grade; they range from preschoolers all the way up to adults. Everyone is an ordinary human being and there are no fantastic powers outside of Reimu, Mouko and Youmu being able to See Dead People. The strangest part overall is some of the character relations: Kanako is said to be Sanae's father, but she hasn't been Gender Flipped or otherwise altered; meanwhile, her mother is Suwako, who's actually younger than her. And yes, this makes just as little sense to the characters themselves as it does to the readers.
  • There's a Transformers High School fic that—wait for it...crosses over with Archie Comics. (Scroll down; it's in zip format.) However, it's kind of a subversion in that it's not mundane — using Applied Phlebotinum, several Transformers go undercover in Riverdale, including several who end up going to Riverdale High.
  • WALL•E has Eighty Percent of the People. Wally, a nerdy D&D player here, invites Eve, the school's most popular girl who has no idea that she's the school's most popular girl, over for a D&D session at Moe's, and they get to know each other.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • There are a few fan fiction pieces floating around with this setting. Almost always, they keep the GRIMDARK GRIMDARK and insanity of the characters, and if done well are a hilarious read.
    • The most well-known variation is a body of work by various authors referred to as Warhammer High, which either recasts the Primarchs as teenage girls or centers around their teenage daughters.
  • Warrior Cats High School AU. Everyone is horribly out of character. A few manage to pull it off and bring on laughs.
  • A good percentage of the Wings of Fire fanfiction on Wattpad turn the characters into human high schoolers. Exactly how this is done varies although generally the Dragonets of Destiny are seniors, and the Jade Winglet juniors, although it's not uncommon to have the Jade Winglet as freshmen, and fics where the Dragonets of Destiny are the teachers are not unheard of. Whether or not similar dramatic storylines from the books play out (such as Darkstalker, Scarlet and/or Morrowseer being out-and-out villainous and trying to kill people, Starflight losing his sight etc.) varies, but generally the stories focus on the relationships between the cast, with Glory x Deathbringer being the most popular ship, followed by the Qibli/Moon/Winter love triangle.
  • Wildly popular author Atomicskull did it brilliantly with Never Know Your Story Like I Do, following Kirk and McCoy from elementary all the way through grad school. Sadly, it is no longer available on LiveJournal.
  • There's a 30 Day AU Challenge on Tumblr, and High School is the second challenge on the list. Example here.
  • Much like Total Drama, Danganronpa has many stories detailing all of the cast simply attending school together with no deaths. These are so common that there is a name for it, the "Non-Despair AU".
  • In SilfofinaDragon's modern day Sengoku Basara fanfics (set years after Gakuen Basara), starting from chapter 5 part 4, we learn that Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura's son Masa has his adventures with friends and familiar SB characters at Basara Academy.
  • Highschool for Infinite Losers puts this AU into perspective for the webseries HFILnote  In a surprising twist, despite fics of its nature usually being the type to have everyone be powerless humans (something the author herself has a disdain for), every character is said to retain their original counterparts's traits note 

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