I said in last night's blurb that I would explain why I'm barring OCs from this discussion series, so here it is. OC stands for "original character" and while there's nothing inherently wrong with original characters (all characters are someone's original creation, after all), I find in my perusal of the fandom, mostly through FF.Net, that there are copious amounts of OCs in Museum fanfiction. And they are girls. And they are somehow related to Larry, or occasionally they are part of the past, as stand-alones or relatives to, of course, Ahkmenrah and Kahmunrah. But mostly they are related to Larry. Larry has so many daughters, nieces, sisters, cousins, whatever that you can't swing a dead cat in the fandom without hitting one. And the trouble persists: not only are they related to Larry or another member of the canon cast, they take up with a member of the canon cast. Usually this is Ahkmenrah (for a kid who can't be much older than a teenager he sure gets around), sometimes Kahmunrah. For Larry's nonrelatives, there might be a relationship there, but usually that person will get paired up with Jedediah, Octavius, or both (which interferes with one of my ships and is why I don't generally read those works). I get most of this information from summaries, so you don't go biting my head off, but the summary serves the purpose of allowing us to judge for ourselves whether a fic will be worth our time as fans. I look for good Night at the Museum fanfiction about the Brothers Egypt and I get more OCs than I feel like I need to deal with. If I want to read about your OCs, I'll read your original novel. I want to read about the canon characters, which is why I'm perusing through fanfiction.
That is why OCs are barred from the foregoing discourse into the various alternate universes (or AUs) that this next series is launching into.
Ardent followers of this blog will have the fact stored somewhere within their brains that I have a favorite AU concept for the Museum movies, and that's what would have happened if Kahmunrah had won the Battle of the Smithsonian and been allowed to move forward with his plans to conquer the world. There is a logical progression of events which must happen here: the first is get your army completely out of the underworld, and the second is to guarantee immortality and immunity to sunlight for yourself, your generals, your men, and whoever else happens to ally with you (because accidentally killing your allies is not the greatest way to get things done). Of course tablet magic backfires for whatever reason, but it may not. Kahmunrah may legitimately win, and the tablet may need to be actively stolen from his possession in order for it to be of any use at all to the resistance. That's another path this AU could take. I just happen to particularly like the idea of what would happen if these two brothers finally came into contact with each other again after thousands of years of not seeing or speaking to each other. Expect lots of fighting.
The other "bad guy wins" AU is what happens when Cecil and his two buddies are successful in ripping off the museum. This is where we go into the long-term effects the tablet would have on living people rather than just waxworks and stuffed monkeys, which is in itself a good exploration of what the tablet can and can't do with regard to giving things new life, and what health hazards it might pose to elderly people just trying to live longer. Since Cecil does lose, the franchise feels no need to go into the exact logistics of how his plan would work; all they tell us is that the guards got new life at night just like the exhibits, and they planned to keep it that way. An AU to explore this particular facet of tablet magic would be a welcome addition to the fandom, at least from my perspective.
Next on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": The next cluster of possible OC-Free AUs you as a NATM fan may choose to explore!
Countdown: 318 Days to NATM 3
Hi, I came across this post while searching for NATM fanfiction. I agree with you on the proliferation of OCs on ff.net (one of the reasons why I avoid that site most of the time). Thankfully, AO3 has a smaller but higher quality cache of fic, and a lot of it is OC-free. In fact, to plug my own fic, I recently put up one that focuses on Ahkmenrah's sojourn in his tomb, with a Kahmunrah cameo. It is slash, fair warning, but only lightly so.
ReplyDeleteAs for your proposed dark AUs - I like them! Unfortunately, canon tends to prioritize entertainment over consistency (as I discovered while trying to write my fic) so trying to determine the extent of the tablet magic and its twisty course through history would involve a lot of handwaving and making stuff up. I might take up elements of your ideas, if that's okay with you - thought we'll have to see what new wrenches NATM 3 throws into the works before anyone should really try to explore anymore implications. :)
My fic is here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/2328980
I don't peruse AO3 very much (I'm also part of the National Treasure fandom and sometimes go there in a futile search for Ian/Shaw fanfic), but I have been there. I agree, it's definitely better than what you find on FFNet. I think I happened upon your fic, though. Is it the one where such details are interspersed with talking to Larry, teaching him to fight, and then buying coffee together?
DeleteI tend to think a lot about the tablet and it's magic anyway (and I have yet to figure out how pieces that rotate can also be pressed, unless they're being magically suspended; you know how even when your laptop's off your clock still runs, because the machine is on basal battery power? Same idea). Somewhere on here I have a post solely devoted to it (Night #4, I'm pretty sure) which talks about its properties as shown in canon and tries to explain them. This is before I ever knew the third movie was coming out and that Ahk's father made the tablet (I can't imagine why, and therefore he's very suspish in my mind), so I came up with the notion that it was divinely created as a result of Ra's forced retirement from his position as King of the Gods by Isis. I'm even inclined to think that the tablet and the gate were created together and the corpse-looking thing on the door is Ra himself.
You're more than welcome to work with the ideas; I think it's good for the blog and myself if what I come up with as far as fanon is concerned gets spread far and wide and other people work with it, as well. But we'll have to see what SOTT says is canon before we go too far into this (and heck, that movie might make me tweak my own fanfic project that I'm working on--a rewrite of the end of BOTS such that tablet hijinks ensue and Ahk is awakened/summoned, it ties into what I said above about the tablet's creation, such that in essence, to return to the earthly realm, Ra needs a vessel, as his body is in such a poor state, and he knew all this would happen (he's a god) so he made sure someone in the history of time and space was chosen who would be worthy of such an honor and taxing task).