AU meme

[oneiriad]

Stealing this meme in the hopes of potentially amusing myself.

Take any one of the fandoms you know I write/rec/read AND give me a type of AU (space opera AU, pirate AU, superhero AU, etc) OR another time period (Ancient Rome, Regency England, etc). I will then explain the gist of the story I would write for that AU

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[neotoma]

Transformers in Regency England!

[oneiriad]

The year is 1815. The Napoleonic Wars - are not over. Not even close.

Right, first - Regency is defined as the period between 1811 and 1820 - the very end of the Age of Napoleon and - which is interesting as far as Transformers go - the dawn of the age of steam, featuring such marvels as locomotives, steam boats and submarines. Admittedly, for camouflage purposes they'd be kind of useless for the Cybertronians - they'd be bound to attract more attention than divert, that way. If they could somehow figure out how to do it without actual horses getting involved, a carriage would make a far better alt-mode. Anyway...

Right, let's world-build. Now, we're all used to thinking of England as the good guys fighting the world-conquering Napoleon, so naturally, the easy assumption would be Autobots with England, right? Decepticons with the French?

Yeah, let's mix it up a bit.

The Cybertronians arrive on Earth around the time of the French revolution - post-Bastille, pre-full-scale regime of terror, I think. And thing is? The early French Republic had so much potential - free citizens, abolishing slavery, foundation of logic fighting against despots and superstition - and then compare it to England, a monarchy that had slaves and colonies and based a lot of its military might on a navy mostly composed of pressed men.

So, this is what happened, in my AU. The Cybertronians arrived - and the Autobots wound up joining the French, and in so doing helped curb the worst excesses of the mob and make the Republic start to grow into its potential. Much to the worry of the surrounding monarchies...

A bit later, when the British find themselves worrying about how the strange clockwork creatures of the French are stopping all attempts by righteous, God-fearing armies to restore the House of Bourbon, they find themselves approached by an oddly similar and yet quite different group, who find the British class-divided society much to their liking. Soon, Decepticon troops join the British in fighting the wicked French for the righteous cause of freedom and enterprise (and empire! Mustn't forget empire!)

In France, in the meantime, a little Corsican officer has risen to power, through his prowess as general and his ingenuity and willingness to adapt to new strategies to take full advantage of the great machines, as well as his political skills to sway these new allies to fight, spinning tales of the importance of spreading the revolution, the freedom to the whole wide world, and distracting them from asking the more unfortunate questions.

Soon, Europe is a battlefield - the British Decepticon-aided forces have few compunctions about deploying the full destructive capacity of their allies (after all, the British didn't mind randomly bombarding the capitals of neutral nations to get to steal their navies in RL, I hardly doubt it would OOC for them to invent the Blitzkrieg a century early). And not just Europe - with the huge leaps in technology, in speed of transport and communication brought by the Cybertronians, the war spreads faster and more thoroughly to the rest of the planet than anyone could anticipate. Soon, the gazettes start to refer to it as a World War.

In the meantime, most of Britain itself is still oddly idyllic - here and there, the King's Iron Knights have been granted fiefs, usually close to useful mines and rivers, and new cities of smog and factories are growing as the industrial revolution has been put into full speed ahead. But most of Britain is idyllic, and in the town of Bath, the gentry still gather to take the waters and allow the youth to dance and make merry, safe, for the French's Wicked (and no doubt Papist) Machines of War and Destruction seems to fear the British coastline (or maybe Napoleon has yet to find an argument against the Autobots' annoying issues with attacking civilian populations).

And it is in Bath the story would begin, with our heroine (because Regency has heroines, right?) bored with dancing and choosing to take a quite scandalous midnight stroll all alone along the river, comes to witness a great and most certainly not decently British machine rising from the water, and soon she finds herself involved in a great adventure full of espionage and sabotage, a secret Luddite resistance movement (which surprises her, since there isn't anything to resist, is there? surely Britain is the defender of the free world, isn't it?), and a trip (not quite voluntary) to the nearly Iron Knight Fief, where work is underway on a machine which might change the course of the war - which surely she should want, right? - and where the human overseer of the works is a man most dark and sarcastic and most certainly not suitable and possibly part foreign, but perhaps he will save her from the fiendish French and together they can save the Monarchy and earn the gratitude of both the Prince Regent and his Iron Minister.

Yeah, so - I suspect the bad guys are going to win this story. And our heroine and brooding Byronic hero (who no doubt has a dark and most secret and tragic past) won't even notice. Just typical...