![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopWas awesome, and you should all go out and buy the whole mini. Seriously, I can think of no other Deadpool story published since Cable&Deadpool ended that I have enjoyed nearly this much. I am probably a little biased since I have a thing for well thought-out AU stories - and I have a definite thing for Deadpool stories featuring Cable in important supporting roles - but this just delivered on every front: great concept, great story, lots of clever twists, utterly intriguing takes on some of my favourite characters, and that ending... :3 A little hard to follow in a places, largely due to some murky art, but all my complaints beyond that are drifting rapidly into nitpick territory. The final issue came out right before Christmas and (meaning no offense to any of my rellis) I'm not sure I got anything else for Christmas I loved as much. *_*
The only reason it has taken me so long to say something about it is because the full review is getting kind of enormous. Well, that and a distressing pile of unfinished cosplay stuff still staring at me. But I have a lot to squee about in this mini and believe me, I do still intend to do so in full.
(The following is not the review. This is a chunk that was cut out of the review because it goes wildly off on a lot of tangents about My Thoughts On Fanfic and My Thoughts On What Makes A Good AU Story with only a little bit about the actual Pulp mini at the end, and I am dumping here so at least it's all out of my head.)
Reading Deadpool Pulp was a lot like reading really good AU fic.
Given that this is a professionally published story that may seem like damning it with faint praise, but keep in mind that this is a western comic book fandom, where the biggest difference between the fanfic and the canon is that the fanfic is more likely to be written by and for women and include more romance/smut, whereas the canon is treated to a generally more consistent editorial policy (note that 'consistent' is not always necessarily synonymous with 'rigorous' or 'better' – characterisation, internal consistency and logic often vary just as much in the published work as in the fan versions). The biggest distinction between most Marvel/DC writers and the fans is that the former are paid for their work. Keep in mind also that when I say 'fanfic', I'm including more or less everything that falls under the derivative/transformative works banner, publishable or not: two of my all-time favourite Neil Gaiman short stories are a twisted retelling of Snow White and a Sherlock Holmes AU based in a version of the Cthulhu mythos – but more on the specific examples later.
Here's the thing about derivative works – they do have their downsides: the obvious legal/monetary issues, the fact that plenty of writers don't work well with other people's characters, and even if you think they do, the fans are going to have much stronger expectations about what can and can't happen to their favourite character than they would for an OC, and there's no guarantee they'll agree with your take (and as anyone who's seen the backlash against certain plot points from Marvel's Civil War or DC's various Crisis events over the last few years would know, that's putting it mildly). But any work that builds on an established continuity also gets the advantage that the hard work of getting someone to invest in the world they're writing about has been done already. The setting of the scene, the introduction of the characters – all the messy exposition that bogs down the first act, that's done, that's over with, and you can cut straight to the story. You don't have to sell the concept, just the execution, and the fact your established fanbase is primed to be a whole lot more critical of your execution is peanuts compared to the fact that you've already got an established fanbase. And that's true regardless of whether you're writing a canonical instalment, an AU spin-off or a porny fanfic.
This is pretty much the core of my point in all this fanfic talk – getting people invested in a story to the stage that they'll seek out more of it, spend money on high quality copies and/or start making their own fanwork to celebrate it – that's a big deal. It's one the entertainment industry with it's love of franchises is all too aware of – the longer you run, the more opportunity you have to build a loyal fanbase. Not everything grabs you with the first episode, more than a few of what have since become my favourite series took a good while to find their stride it can take a pretty serious time investment to decide if a new series is going to be for you, and most of the time most of us will be happier to stick with what we know. At the very least, it keeps our options simpler.
Of course, on the fanfic end, there's also the bonus of the social aspect of being actively involved in a fandom. It's slightly embarrassing how often I've found myself clicking on a fanfic – even for a series I have no more than passing familiarity with – than a random original story. The best I can explain it something like this: I like the feeling that a character is well developed and interesting enough that he or she has inspired someone with no monetary incentive to tell new stories about them. I like going in with the knowledge that if the characters grab me, there's going to be plenty more material about them for me to watch or read, both official and fan-made, and there are going to be people to share the squee with. It certainly helps that I like huge sprawling worlds that reward you for going to the effort to track down the more obscure bits of associated canon, both because there's more to enjoy and because it takes some of passivity out of the act of consuming it. Even if I'm reading slash (which, let's face it, is more likely than not) I like the feeling that the characters have an existence beyond being one half of a torrid romance, and I definitely like being able to expect a dozen different fan-written versions of how things might have gone down between them, rather than just the one canonical one.
And – here's the part even I find a little weird – it has come to my attention that, at least for the sake of casual entertainment, I am often more likely to enjoy an AU featuring a couple of characters I know than, say, the equivalent Shousetsu Bang Bang short featuring much the same scenario, even if the AU version is so wildly AU that they haven't retained more than a couple of questionably distinguishing character traits apiece. I like the feeling that I'm reading a part of something bigger, and I like the feeling that I know these characters, even if that feeling is mostly illusory. There are limits, even when I'm only looking for a bit of light-hearted cheese my suspension of disbelief only goes so far, but stick an AU tag on a fic and it'll automatically start with a few bonus points. Long after fans have filled every single obvious crack in canon a dozen times over, AUs ensure a fandom will practically never run out of new possibilities.
Frankly, it's probably not a bad thing that an awfully big contingent of fandom doesn't feel the same way.
AUs are one heck of a polarising subject in fandom. For everyone who loves them, there seems to be at least one person who finds the loose way they play around with canon far more insulting than endearing. (The number of times I've had comments on my own AU fic to the effect of “I hate all AUs but I enjoyed this” boggles me slightly – because it's usually not “AUs aren't usually my thing but I enjoyed this” or even “I hate most AUs”, it's “I hate AUs”, period, the fact they're right now commenting on a counterexample notwithstanding.) Some of that, I think, is the simple fact that when a lot of people go looking for fanfic, they want fanfic based on the source material, not fanfic about a Mary Sue, not fanfic that throws any inconvenient canon details to the wind, and certainly not yet another high school AU – but a lot also probably has to do with how many high school AUs some fandoms produce, and how many of them are written by real high schoolers for the specific purpose of letting them throw all those inconvenient canon details to the wind and focus on their Mary Sue instead. How this leads to quite the level of seething hatred a lot of people feel for AUs I can't say I entirely understand, but merely labelling your fic AU is not a Get Out Of Jail Free card when it comes to having the result accepted.
To boil all that down to some kind of relevant point, derivative works of any kind – and AU stories more than most – can be an easy way to guarantee your work an audience, but if you rely on that to carry the story people will notice and they may not be all that forgiving. Creating an AU that uses canon in a genuinely interesting way is a whole other problem. So with all that out of the way, what I sat down to talk about is what it takes to create an AU that is objectively good, rather than one that relies entirely on fannish nostalgia to engage its audience.
There's a lot that can be done by messing around with the setting of a story. It can be used to update a historical work that was contemporary at the time of its writing so that it becomes contemporary to audiences now (the Romeo and Juliet movie, or the recent Sherlock TV series), to keep a series fresh over multiple series (Blackadder, where each season was set in a different era of history), as a way to comment on story elements or character traits in a way the usual setting doesn't allow (eg, the popularity Golden Compass AU fic or anything which can be used as an excuse to bring one of the less stable cast members into contact with a modern day psychologist), or just as a bit of light-hearted fun. Novelty will always be half the value, but there's no shame in that; the same goes for any piece of speculative fiction written without pretension of being the next great literary masterpiece.
But the AUs that truly impress me – and I say this as the same person who gets more than her share out of the some of the cheesiest of the genre – are those that take their concept those extra couple of levels beyond the superficial and find ways to make familiar elements of the original work fit into the new setting in ways you never saw coming. They're the ones that don't just tell a story where a bunch of fantasy characters are dumped unceremoniously into a modern setting, they tell the story where the paladin is a police officer, the cleric is a medic, the elf is a hippie and the angel is a fighter pilot (or vice-versa), and the subplot where someone turns out to be the last of the line of kings (whose return will herald a new age of prosperity for a plague-stricken country, etc) is replaced by the one where his family carries a rare genetic immunity that, thanks to the miracle of modern science, will yield much the same result. Not everything will translate; you may have to drop the thing with the flying monkeys altogether and play up the plague angle into something much bigger than what was in the original text, but that's all to the good – people aren't reading to see the same story they knew retold with a search-and-replace for all instances of 'leechcraft' with 'science-based medicine', they're reading to see how the story changes in a setting where, taken at face value, you probably wouldn't think it should work at all. How wild and ridiculous your AU setting is matters less than the case you make for how your characters fit into it.
Presumably it's possible to go overboard finding parallels between old setting and new, but as a general rule the more you can work in the better, whether they're playful nods to old canon (like giving modern-day Watson a blog and Sherlock an addiction to nicotine patches), or defining plot points. To try an example I didn't pull off the top of my head, a Marvel AU set in the late Tudor period where Nick Fury works for Queen Elizabeth and the X-Men have to deal with life when witch-hunting was still a socially acceptable passtime – that already has obvious appeal, though it's a little obvious. Work in a subplot about 'The Four of the Fantastick', who acquired powers with a surprisingly fitting elemental motif while far from home on exploratory voyage, and you get extra points for being clever. But bring all together at the end so that subplot about the (real, history and even period appropriate!) struggling colony on the shores of the America becomes and excuse to bring all those traditionally American heroes to the 'new world' just in time for the big finale (pay no attention to the mysteriously pale Indian behind the curtain!), and you haven't just made your case, you've made it ironclad. (Even if you do make us spend the entire story watching that 'Parquagh' kid have near misses with venomous spiders.) That all of this happens over the course of Neil Gaiman's 1602 should not be surprising, since if there's anyone in writing today who really loves telling stories about stories, it would be Gaiman (I could do a whole extra spiel about the way he gets the creeping horrors of the Cthulhu mythos to blend with the sane, rational world of Sherlock Holmes in A Study In Emerald), and it would would be hard for me to think of many better examples.
The glory of AUs is that any plot element that your audience would recognise with from the original work can show up, with little or no introduction - but none of them have to, so the surprise of seeing how it all comes together remains intact. That gives the author an almost limitless armoury of potential Chekov's Guns to choose from, all ready-hung and primed to fire the moment you figure out what to do with them. This does not mean that all AUs are created equal or that writing one is easy – the job of writing an AU is very much like putting together a pleasing picture out of half the pieces from two different jigsaws – but it does mean that a good marriage of source and setting can produce some very interesting ways to make it all work. A really well thought-out AU isn't just a story, it's a magic trick and a logic puzzle, it's a way to show that the characters are strong enough to be recognisable even if they'd been born under completely different circumstances, and it's a chance for the writer to show off just how clever they can be. On the one hand, it's the most pretentious kind meta-commentary, a means to pontificate with full worked examples of how does this character archtype map on to that one in iteration umpteen of the nature versus nurture debate, while on the other, it's cheesy fun of the same sort that makes us cheer at the thought of seeing Optimus Prime duke it out with Eva Unit 1. A good AU story delivers on every level.
And finally getting right back to the point, Deadpool Pulp would have to be up there with the most satisfying AU stories I've ever read.
Recommendations aside, I was not expecting this.
The thing about comic AUs is that even if they do include such stellar examples as 1602 or Superman: Secret Identity – even if the tradition of What Ifs and 'imaginary stories' has been part of comic history almost forever – the majority aren't much more than excuses to write in even more blood and gore (the Max line), or to give the audience a continuity-light modern day starting point (the Ultimate or Year Zero lines), or a 'what if the end of this event had been different' one-shot deals. Decent enough ideas but hardly exactly high brow entertainment, and with the multitude of other Deadpool titles that Marvel's been pumping out lately I wasn't expecting Deadpool Pulp to be anything much more than a cheap excuse to do a grim-and-gritty Deadpool title with noir-style artwork.
I'm pretty sure I was past halfway through the series before it even dawned on me just how much thought had gone into it – that they weren't just writing a Deadpool story in the post-WWII/early Cold War era, they were writing about a character who's canonically a mentally deranged ex-soldier and who's signature gear includes twin katanas – and writing him into a time period when soldiers were coming back from Japanese internment camps with severe cases of PTSD. The idea throws his traditional origin story out the window – his scars, his healing factor – and yet it works, and it works brilliantly. I'd heard Cable and Stryfe were involved, cast as mid-ranking government/military types of some kind or other, which seemed a bit off at first glance. I hadn't realised that Cable (a.k.a. Nathan I-always-know-better-than-you Summers) was being cast a an FBI official – this being the same FBI known for keeping tabs on everyone and keeping secrets even from the president. [Spoiler-texting these last couple of points, highlight to read] I certainly didn't realise Stryfe (powerful telepath with a history of messing with people's heads) was going to turn out to be running the pulp-verse version of the 1950's MKULTRA project, widely rumoured to have a secret goal of brainwashing people into programmed assassins.
And for the finale – wow. We're talking about a period where the threat of nuclear war was hanging over everyone's heads 24/7 and the idea of radiation sickness had recently entered public consciousness. We're talking about a lead character with hideous scarring and a case of terminal cancer in his 616 backstory. We're also talking about a series which had thus far not included any actual superpowers and relatively few fantasy/sci-fi elements, that had managed to create Deadpool without Weapon X involvement, so I feel more or less justified in how I completely failed to guess that all that might still be lurking in Deadpool's future. And we're still talking about the kind of ending that seems so inevitable in retrospect – that made so much sense – that you can't help but feel a little embarrassed that you never saw it coming.
In brief, without the spoilers, it really uses 616 canon well, and it really uses the AU setting it's chosen, and the result is both a very solid narrative and a story that works in so many ways I didn't expect, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.
And next time I try to explain what I like in a good AU story, I'm going to have one more excellent example to cite at people.
The only reason it has taken me so long to say something about it is because the full review is getting kind of enormous. Well, that and a distressing pile of unfinished cosplay stuff still staring at me. But I have a lot to squee about in this mini and believe me, I do still intend to do so in full.
(The following is not the review. This is a chunk that was cut out of the review because it goes wildly off on a lot of tangents about My Thoughts On Fanfic and My Thoughts On What Makes A Good AU Story with only a little bit about the actual Pulp mini at the end, and I am dumping here so at least it's all out of my head.)
Reading Deadpool Pulp was a lot like reading really good AU fic.
Given that this is a professionally published story that may seem like damning it with faint praise, but keep in mind that this is a western comic book fandom, where the biggest difference between the fanfic and the canon is that the fanfic is more likely to be written by and for women and include more romance/smut, whereas the canon is treated to a generally more consistent editorial policy (note that 'consistent' is not always necessarily synonymous with 'rigorous' or 'better' – characterisation, internal consistency and logic often vary just as much in the published work as in the fan versions). The biggest distinction between most Marvel/DC writers and the fans is that the former are paid for their work. Keep in mind also that when I say 'fanfic', I'm including more or less everything that falls under the derivative/transformative works banner, publishable or not: two of my all-time favourite Neil Gaiman short stories are a twisted retelling of Snow White and a Sherlock Holmes AU based in a version of the Cthulhu mythos – but more on the specific examples later.
Here's the thing about derivative works – they do have their downsides: the obvious legal/monetary issues, the fact that plenty of writers don't work well with other people's characters, and even if you think they do, the fans are going to have much stronger expectations about what can and can't happen to their favourite character than they would for an OC, and there's no guarantee they'll agree with your take (and as anyone who's seen the backlash against certain plot points from Marvel's Civil War or DC's various Crisis events over the last few years would know, that's putting it mildly). But any work that builds on an established continuity also gets the advantage that the hard work of getting someone to invest in the world they're writing about has been done already. The setting of the scene, the introduction of the characters – all the messy exposition that bogs down the first act, that's done, that's over with, and you can cut straight to the story. You don't have to sell the concept, just the execution, and the fact your established fanbase is primed to be a whole lot more critical of your execution is peanuts compared to the fact that you've already got an established fanbase. And that's true regardless of whether you're writing a canonical instalment, an AU spin-off or a porny fanfic.
This is pretty much the core of my point in all this fanfic talk – getting people invested in a story to the stage that they'll seek out more of it, spend money on high quality copies and/or start making their own fanwork to celebrate it – that's a big deal. It's one the entertainment industry with it's love of franchises is all too aware of – the longer you run, the more opportunity you have to build a loyal fanbase. Not everything grabs you with the first episode, more than a few of what have since become my favourite series took a good while to find their stride it can take a pretty serious time investment to decide if a new series is going to be for you, and most of the time most of us will be happier to stick with what we know. At the very least, it keeps our options simpler.
Of course, on the fanfic end, there's also the bonus of the social aspect of being actively involved in a fandom. It's slightly embarrassing how often I've found myself clicking on a fanfic – even for a series I have no more than passing familiarity with – than a random original story. The best I can explain it something like this: I like the feeling that a character is well developed and interesting enough that he or she has inspired someone with no monetary incentive to tell new stories about them. I like going in with the knowledge that if the characters grab me, there's going to be plenty more material about them for me to watch or read, both official and fan-made, and there are going to be people to share the squee with. It certainly helps that I like huge sprawling worlds that reward you for going to the effort to track down the more obscure bits of associated canon, both because there's more to enjoy and because it takes some of passivity out of the act of consuming it. Even if I'm reading slash (which, let's face it, is more likely than not) I like the feeling that the characters have an existence beyond being one half of a torrid romance, and I definitely like being able to expect a dozen different fan-written versions of how things might have gone down between them, rather than just the one canonical one.
And – here's the part even I find a little weird – it has come to my attention that, at least for the sake of casual entertainment, I am often more likely to enjoy an AU featuring a couple of characters I know than, say, the equivalent Shousetsu Bang Bang short featuring much the same scenario, even if the AU version is so wildly AU that they haven't retained more than a couple of questionably distinguishing character traits apiece. I like the feeling that I'm reading a part of something bigger, and I like the feeling that I know these characters, even if that feeling is mostly illusory. There are limits, even when I'm only looking for a bit of light-hearted cheese my suspension of disbelief only goes so far, but stick an AU tag on a fic and it'll automatically start with a few bonus points. Long after fans have filled every single obvious crack in canon a dozen times over, AUs ensure a fandom will practically never run out of new possibilities.
Frankly, it's probably not a bad thing that an awfully big contingent of fandom doesn't feel the same way.
AUs are one heck of a polarising subject in fandom. For everyone who loves them, there seems to be at least one person who finds the loose way they play around with canon far more insulting than endearing. (The number of times I've had comments on my own AU fic to the effect of “I hate all AUs but I enjoyed this” boggles me slightly – because it's usually not “AUs aren't usually my thing but I enjoyed this” or even “I hate most AUs”, it's “I hate AUs”, period, the fact they're right now commenting on a counterexample notwithstanding.) Some of that, I think, is the simple fact that when a lot of people go looking for fanfic, they want fanfic based on the source material, not fanfic about a Mary Sue, not fanfic that throws any inconvenient canon details to the wind, and certainly not yet another high school AU – but a lot also probably has to do with how many high school AUs some fandoms produce, and how many of them are written by real high schoolers for the specific purpose of letting them throw all those inconvenient canon details to the wind and focus on their Mary Sue instead. How this leads to quite the level of seething hatred a lot of people feel for AUs I can't say I entirely understand, but merely labelling your fic AU is not a Get Out Of Jail Free card when it comes to having the result accepted.
To boil all that down to some kind of relevant point, derivative works of any kind – and AU stories more than most – can be an easy way to guarantee your work an audience, but if you rely on that to carry the story people will notice and they may not be all that forgiving. Creating an AU that uses canon in a genuinely interesting way is a whole other problem. So with all that out of the way, what I sat down to talk about is what it takes to create an AU that is objectively good, rather than one that relies entirely on fannish nostalgia to engage its audience.
There's a lot that can be done by messing around with the setting of a story. It can be used to update a historical work that was contemporary at the time of its writing so that it becomes contemporary to audiences now (the Romeo and Juliet movie, or the recent Sherlock TV series), to keep a series fresh over multiple series (Blackadder, where each season was set in a different era of history), as a way to comment on story elements or character traits in a way the usual setting doesn't allow (eg, the popularity Golden Compass AU fic or anything which can be used as an excuse to bring one of the less stable cast members into contact with a modern day psychologist), or just as a bit of light-hearted fun. Novelty will always be half the value, but there's no shame in that; the same goes for any piece of speculative fiction written without pretension of being the next great literary masterpiece.
But the AUs that truly impress me – and I say this as the same person who gets more than her share out of the some of the cheesiest of the genre – are those that take their concept those extra couple of levels beyond the superficial and find ways to make familiar elements of the original work fit into the new setting in ways you never saw coming. They're the ones that don't just tell a story where a bunch of fantasy characters are dumped unceremoniously into a modern setting, they tell the story where the paladin is a police officer, the cleric is a medic, the elf is a hippie and the angel is a fighter pilot (or vice-versa), and the subplot where someone turns out to be the last of the line of kings (whose return will herald a new age of prosperity for a plague-stricken country, etc) is replaced by the one where his family carries a rare genetic immunity that, thanks to the miracle of modern science, will yield much the same result. Not everything will translate; you may have to drop the thing with the flying monkeys altogether and play up the plague angle into something much bigger than what was in the original text, but that's all to the good – people aren't reading to see the same story they knew retold with a search-and-replace for all instances of 'leechcraft' with 'science-based medicine', they're reading to see how the story changes in a setting where, taken at face value, you probably wouldn't think it should work at all. How wild and ridiculous your AU setting is matters less than the case you make for how your characters fit into it.
Presumably it's possible to go overboard finding parallels between old setting and new, but as a general rule the more you can work in the better, whether they're playful nods to old canon (like giving modern-day Watson a blog and Sherlock an addiction to nicotine patches), or defining plot points. To try an example I didn't pull off the top of my head, a Marvel AU set in the late Tudor period where Nick Fury works for Queen Elizabeth and the X-Men have to deal with life when witch-hunting was still a socially acceptable passtime – that already has obvious appeal, though it's a little obvious. Work in a subplot about 'The Four of the Fantastick', who acquired powers with a surprisingly fitting elemental motif while far from home on exploratory voyage, and you get extra points for being clever. But bring all together at the end so that subplot about the (real, history and even period appropriate!) struggling colony on the shores of the America becomes and excuse to bring all those traditionally American heroes to the 'new world' just in time for the big finale (pay no attention to the mysteriously pale Indian behind the curtain!), and you haven't just made your case, you've made it ironclad. (Even if you do make us spend the entire story watching that 'Parquagh' kid have near misses with venomous spiders.) That all of this happens over the course of Neil Gaiman's 1602 should not be surprising, since if there's anyone in writing today who really loves telling stories about stories, it would be Gaiman (I could do a whole extra spiel about the way he gets the creeping horrors of the Cthulhu mythos to blend with the sane, rational world of Sherlock Holmes in A Study In Emerald), and it would would be hard for me to think of many better examples.
The glory of AUs is that any plot element that your audience would recognise with from the original work can show up, with little or no introduction - but none of them have to, so the surprise of seeing how it all comes together remains intact. That gives the author an almost limitless armoury of potential Chekov's Guns to choose from, all ready-hung and primed to fire the moment you figure out what to do with them. This does not mean that all AUs are created equal or that writing one is easy – the job of writing an AU is very much like putting together a pleasing picture out of half the pieces from two different jigsaws – but it does mean that a good marriage of source and setting can produce some very interesting ways to make it all work. A really well thought-out AU isn't just a story, it's a magic trick and a logic puzzle, it's a way to show that the characters are strong enough to be recognisable even if they'd been born under completely different circumstances, and it's a chance for the writer to show off just how clever they can be. On the one hand, it's the most pretentious kind meta-commentary, a means to pontificate with full worked examples of how does this character archtype map on to that one in iteration umpteen of the nature versus nurture debate, while on the other, it's cheesy fun of the same sort that makes us cheer at the thought of seeing Optimus Prime duke it out with Eva Unit 1. A good AU story delivers on every level.
And finally getting right back to the point, Deadpool Pulp would have to be up there with the most satisfying AU stories I've ever read.
Recommendations aside, I was not expecting this.
The thing about comic AUs is that even if they do include such stellar examples as 1602 or Superman: Secret Identity – even if the tradition of What Ifs and 'imaginary stories' has been part of comic history almost forever – the majority aren't much more than excuses to write in even more blood and gore (the Max line), or to give the audience a continuity-light modern day starting point (the Ultimate or Year Zero lines), or a 'what if the end of this event had been different' one-shot deals. Decent enough ideas but hardly exactly high brow entertainment, and with the multitude of other Deadpool titles that Marvel's been pumping out lately I wasn't expecting Deadpool Pulp to be anything much more than a cheap excuse to do a grim-and-gritty Deadpool title with noir-style artwork.
I'm pretty sure I was past halfway through the series before it even dawned on me just how much thought had gone into it – that they weren't just writing a Deadpool story in the post-WWII/early Cold War era, they were writing about a character who's canonically a mentally deranged ex-soldier and who's signature gear includes twin katanas – and writing him into a time period when soldiers were coming back from Japanese internment camps with severe cases of PTSD. The idea throws his traditional origin story out the window – his scars, his healing factor – and yet it works, and it works brilliantly. I'd heard Cable and Stryfe were involved, cast as mid-ranking government/military types of some kind or other, which seemed a bit off at first glance. I hadn't realised that Cable (a.k.a. Nathan I-always-know-better-than-you Summers) was being cast a an FBI official – this being the same FBI known for keeping tabs on everyone and keeping secrets even from the president. [Spoiler-texting these last couple of points, highlight to read] I certainly didn't realise Stryfe (powerful telepath with a history of messing with people's heads) was going to turn out to be running the pulp-verse version of the 1950's MKULTRA project, widely rumoured to have a secret goal of brainwashing people into programmed assassins.
And for the finale – wow. We're talking about a period where the threat of nuclear war was hanging over everyone's heads 24/7 and the idea of radiation sickness had recently entered public consciousness. We're talking about a lead character with hideous scarring and a case of terminal cancer in his 616 backstory. We're also talking about a series which had thus far not included any actual superpowers and relatively few fantasy/sci-fi elements, that had managed to create Deadpool without Weapon X involvement, so I feel more or less justified in how I completely failed to guess that all that might still be lurking in Deadpool's future. And we're still talking about the kind of ending that seems so inevitable in retrospect – that made so much sense – that you can't help but feel a little embarrassed that you never saw it coming.
In brief, without the spoilers, it really uses 616 canon well, and it really uses the AU setting it's chosen, and the result is both a very solid narrative and a story that works in so many ways I didn't expect, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.
And next time I try to explain what I like in a good AU story, I'm going to have one more excellent example to cite at people.