AllohistoricalAllusion and fan-fic?

Starting a separate thread on this as suggested in https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13543987200A54420100&page=691#comment-17263

It's common for fanfiction to make tongue-in-cheek references to canon events that didn't happen in this universe. However, there seems to be some uncertainty about which trope best fits them.

• Mythology Gag has frequently been used to describe this. However, the description of that trope suggests that it's meant to be a bit more meta. It's things like a James Bond novel indicating that Bond has Scottish ancestry, as a nod to actor Sean Connery. Or the page image, which is about the different ways a character was animated in different releases of the series. Just having a story say something like "Thank goodness Harry Potter was raised by his godfather, can you imagine him being raised by the Dursleys?" doesn't really seem to be leaning hard enough on the fourth wall for this trope.
• Allohistorical Allusion seems to me to describe the concept almost perfectly, except that the description only talks about alternate timelines with Real Life as the base. The fanfiction entries on that page seem to assume that it's okay to use a fictional canon as the base, though. Should the description be changed to reflect this?
• Double-Blind What-If matches quite well, including allowing a fictional canon base, but only if a character is actually wondering, "What If things had gone differently [ie as per canon]?" If it's some other kind of reference, like Archie in The Rigel Black Chronicles bursting into a room and shouting "TRROOOLLL IN THE BASEMENT!" in a completely different context from canon, then it's not such a good fit. Possibly it could be treated as a subtrope of Allohistorical Allusion, if that one really can have fictional base timelines?

Thoughts?

Edited by ThrawnCA on Oct 1st 2021 at 10:41:13 PM

What covers officially licensed alternate continuity media making reference to the original? Like an alternate universe Batman story referencing the original canon. Is that Mythology Gag?

That's pretty much the same question as mine.

Double-Blind What-If is definitely a subtrope of Allohistorical Allusion.

Which still doesn't answer the original question, but there we go.

It seems the question at hand is — do Alternate History Tropes, in general, apply to "canon retelling but" fanfiction?

Allohistorical Allusion has some misuse for any reference to popular history, even for works where it Never Was This Universe. For example:

(Incidentally, I've seen people misuse Mythology Gag for references to literal mythology. Anyway...)

I'd be willing to start a draft for a hypothetical "Allohistorical Allusion but for Alternate Universes" trope. Off the top of my head, Eleutherophobia has a lot of allusions to the fact that the protagonist died in canon. Anyone got a snappy name?

Would the proposed trope then take over every fanfiction entry that's currently on the Allohistorical Allusion page?

Edited by ThrawnCA on Oct 3rd 2021 at 10:48:04 PM

...Looking at more of the examples, Allohistorical Allusion seems like a mess. Most of the Fringe example's sub-bullets are more like Different World, Different Movies. Does this call for a wick check?

Also, here's a non-fanfiction Alternate Continuity example:

Edited by NitroIndigo on Oct 3rd 2021 at 1:53:27 PM

I'm not exactly sure what a "wick check" involves, but if we can get a consensus on what belongs where, I'm happy to move some things to the right pages.

See How to Do a Wick Check.

Okay, I've run a check on Allohistorical Allusion, which has 355 entries. Mostly they're okay, but I'm noticing a tendency to use it just to say, "this character/faction has noticeable similarities to something in Real Life", even if no-one in the story is making a reference. I'm not certain whether that's correct usage? Probably some of them should move to Does This Remind You of Anything?.

I also noticed that the Laconic page for Allohistorical Allusion seems quite narrow; I don't think events are required to be big in order to be a valid allusion.

Otherwise it looks pretty good, a few issues that could be fixed (eg zero-context examples) but overall I'd say it's being understood and used correctly.

Mythology Gag, on the other hand, has 16320 references. I suspect it's being overused. Will wick-check that next.

Edited by ThrawnCA on Oct 3rd 2021 at 9:28:32 PM