There's AU and then there's AU...

As many of the people reading this will know, particularly since I mentioned it in a post yesterday, one of the fandoms I write in is Magnificent 7 - to my mind this is a fandom cursed with a wide variety of alternate universes. You name it, there's probably someone out there writing it... seriously (and for those not in the fandom, this means AU's where the 7 are dog show judges/RNLI lifeboatmen/various combinations of children and adults/members of the SGC/ATF agents/private investigators/male escorts/and so on ad nauseam...).

So, I was more than a little surprised this morning when I got an email telling me that one of my stories had been nominated for an award - 'that's nice', I thought, and then I saw what category it had been nominated in. Now I have to say this isn't a set of awards where there are many categories but even so... the category it's been put into is 'Adult Non-ATF AU'.

Call me naive, but I never envisaged this particular story as being AU. On the one archive where it's uploaded, it's down as Old West and ditto for the lists it's been sent to and nobody has ever commented on this. It's set in Four Corners in the right time period, the guys are the guys - Ezra is not a were-raccoon, he doesn't have psychic powers, he's not secretly an elf. He's who he is in the show, I just twisted the canon storyline to put him in the position of being forced to become sheriff instead of JD. Frankly, I'd say that the whole slash storyline is way more a departure from the canon than the rest of the plotline is, for it to be considered an AU. It's an AU story in the strictest sense of the word, but to my mind the very closeness of my plot and characters to the plot and characters of the show itself negates it being an AU of its own.

Does this make any sense? Maybe you have to have been in this fandom to see the difference...