Meta: Canon, the text, and the AU

babyofthegroup posted recently about something I've been thinking about for a long time. Namely: what makes an AU?

Now, I know that this basically is the same as asking what does or doesn't count as canon, and that in some circles this a big part of the slash wars, and is used in an excessively proscriptive fashion. While I've recently been accused of participating myself in said conflict, I am more interested because I like to think thinky thoughts, and it's fun to engage in the high level of abstraction that said debate requires. After all, this attempt to define what, exactly, an AU isn't all that far removed temporally from my previous post on why definitions are meaningless.

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