👻Using Ghosts To Illustrate My Issues With Mundane!AU Fic👻
👻A Teacher!AU Thought Experiment👻

A note before I start— I don't intend to do anything with the AU I outline in this. As I said in the title, it's more of a thought exercise/experiment to show the possibilities of AUs and the creativity I wish more people exhibited when creating AUs for their fic. (But if anyone does want to write fic for this idea, then be my guest. I won't even ask for credit. ...Unless you change the ships. Then you have to credit me as penance for being incorrect. And if you make it Pat/Cap then I want a tenner, too. In pounds. That's about $13.52 USD. And I'll be looking for those two pennies.)

Thesis statement: I think any AU has the potential to be good. You just have to be creative enough to convince the reader.

First of all, I understand the desire to have an AU where everything is mundane and not fantastical. That goes for any fandom, really, but especially Ghosts. It's near-impossible to have your ships do "normal" relationship stuff when they're all stuck on one plot of land and almost entirely unable to interact with the physical world or even take their clothes off unless you fudge canon a bit. (As an aside, I really like the fanon that if you concentrate on it enough they stay off for a while.)

Creating an AU where they're all normal, not-ghost people seems like the no-brainer method to accomplishing this, but the most immediate problem is that none of them entered each other's lives in the first place by choice. Putting aside the obvious time period differences for a moment, the ghosts only know each other because they happened to die and become ghosts in the same location.

So, okay, it's still easy enough to solve that issue if we're already kind of treading on their canon personalities by making them come from the same time period— Maybe they all coincidentally have jobs at the same place!

...However, the problem with this particular cast of characters is that a majority of them suck so bad as people that I just don't see them being able to actually accomplish these jobs without getting fired extremely quickly, and that's if they managed to get hired at all.

You'd also definitely have to set this in not-quite modern day, since a lot of behaviors and quirks integral to their characters may have flown in the past, but would instantly get someone fired (or worse) in the 2020's.

I was specifically thinking about the popularity of teacher/uni professor AUs for Ghosts, and how admittedly, Cap would be a great candidate for being a stuffy History teacher who wishes he was involved in WWII; and one of the first things I realized after that is that despite how much I ship Cap/Julian, I would not be able to read about Julian being a teacher or professor without wanting to tear my hair out and/or hit the back button.

Oh, god. No. I only like him as a character as much as I do in canon because he's already dead. He can't hurt anyone anymore —he's gotten the ultimate comeuppance of literal death— completely unlike the way he would exist as a character if he was still alive and still capable of being terrible, such as in an AU like this...

My best solution is to have him be involved in a scandal as a young burgeoning politician; one big enough to completely ruin any chance of him actually having a further career, and scandalous enough for him to be disowned and disinherited to let his family save face. Then, he could maybe end up owning a corner shop across from the school the other characters (minus Mike & Alison) work at, and that way he's not in any position of power over female students that he could (and would) harass. (Hell, the audiobook implies he was inviting seventeen-year-old girls in bikinis to parties at his funded-by-taxpayers swimming pool. I wouldn't be able to read or write about Julian having an actual position in a school without either having him behave entirely OOC or wanting to kill him off for real. Worst case scenario at a corner store: he's making unwanted comments and deservedly getting hit with handbags for it. That I can handle.)

Next, I realized another issue in this type of AU with regards to characters like Mary, because there's almost no way to preserve her character. You just can't have her speaking the way she does in canon in a more modern AU... Canon-verse joking about the speech patterns and illiteracy of historical peasants who are long-dead ghosts from hundreds of years ago is one thing, but taking that into the modern day stops being funny very quickly, and starts just being offensive and sad— And anyway, if she were so undereducated, she wouldn't have a teaching position in the first place. One could argue for lunch lady I guess, (Actually, don't they say "dinner lady"? Whatever— pardon any Americanisms. I'm not doing research for a fic I'm not actually writing.) but it still doesn't solve the issue of her characterization being so bound to being from the literal past.

Unfortunately, I just can't see a way to reconcile the basis of her character in a mundane AU without losing what makes her who she is, so my only real solution was to make the AU a nod to the period of the show after Mary gets sucked off ascends, and write in that she's recently left the school to follow Annie after her departure. Maybe they both were threatened with being fired for the crime of... Being in lesbians with each other...? But also after that offense, Annie would absolutely have taken funds from the asshole headteacher (nothing allocated to anything important, more likely funds intended for needlessly upgrading his own office etc.) and made a run for it to settle down somewhere with Mary. So even if they're not physically in the fic, they get to be mentioned by the others and happy offscreen together, and when the previous headteacher resigns in disgrace after being so easily robbed, it leaves an opening for Robin to fill that role and solves how he fits into this AU.

Conversely, I think it's funny enough to handwave Robin's poor speech as him being an ambiguously European French teacher (I feel making fun of Francophones is acceptable. We can't really go this route with Mary without it entering offensive territory), and his class is intended to be immersive, so he never really had to get too good at speaking in English anyway. But with the previous headteacher's resignation, he's now been suddenly promoted, as he somehow has the credentials for it and no one else does, so he's basically just filling the position for the time being.

Mary and Annie's departure also leaves room for the starting point of the AU: If Annie was previously the history teacher, now Cap can be hired to fill that position.

Their departure also helps to fit Fanny in. Firstly, she would be pissed that there's no sought-after position to be filled as an etiquette teacher, (And also pissed she was never able to pursue her true calling of mathematics or business) and would be forced to take up Mary's old job of teaching home economics— maybe even with Kitty as a teaching aide. Luckily, you barely have to change anything about Fanny's character, even if the AU is set several decades after her death, since older conservative women haven't changed all that much since the turn of the 20th century.

And as for Kitty, I feel her personality fits any time period fairly well with a few tweaks. In modern day I imagine she'd be the type of person who grew up with a home tutor that allowed her to not really learn all that much, especially as she's being constantly relocated by her father's business, and when she's eventually told to start her life in England her family is rich enough that she's basically be able to do whatever. Maybe Eleanor has convinced Kitty that she should try to enrich her life with an understanding of the working class to get her away from any rich, eligible bachelors of status, and Kitty ends up actually enjoying her life making students' lives better. She'd also definitely be spending her teaching paycheck on trashy romance paperbacks and her allowance from her father on actual life expenses. ...Or maybe the other way around.

Pat could easily be the area Scoutmaster who recently had to relocate for the bank, so he works closely with a lot of the boys who go to the school and in turn knows some of the teachers and gets asked to fill in and chaperone field trips and events and such. He's pretty easy to fit into the equation since he's modern enough that it doesn't make too much of a difference, and he's not a terrible person like Julian so we don't have to jump through hoops to make sure he doesn't have the power to be completely unlikeable as a character in the setting. Thankfully, Pat is pretty much good old Pat wherever you put him.

Thomas would obviously be the new English literature teacher. Usually I would be upset by having to lose his 19th century affectations, but luckily, there are many freak (affectionate(?)) English teachers who have read so much literature from the 1800's that they just end up speaking like that. He can even still have beef with Byron, and hate that he has to teach his poetry as part of the curriculum. Ironically, all of Thomas' snarking and petty criticisms throughout the lessons would probably get the students to pay more attention, and he'd be pissed about their grade averages going up during that unit before crashing again when they finish that and start the next unit on like, A Midsummer Night's Dream or whatever.

I was at a little bit of a loss for what Humphrey would actually be doing there, since he's too high class to have a bumblefuck janitor's position or anything like that, but he's also stupid enough that I couldn't really see him doing anything too important... I also realized that he'd still be married, so it would only really make sense that his father got him a random position in the school at Humphrey's request as a way to get him out of the house (since Sophie would likely be kicking him out of his own house so often. Again, in a more modern-ish AU, she'd still be some kind of political spy that Humphrey's entirely unaware of, but they still couldn't get divorced from the social shame of it all...). So I guess Humphrey could just be in charge of Phys Ed, under the guiding hand of Cap. ...And by that I mean Cap is basically doing double duty as both the History and unpaid Phys Ed teacher while Humphrey just blows a whistle and goes "...Right. What he said."

And this is also an opportunity for Thomas/Humphrey and Cap/Julian, since the outdoor area where Phys Ed activities are held can be in view from both Julian's shop and the window of the English room. (I think Thomas would be a little too excited to be conducting a sordid affair. I don't think he would realize Sophie doesn't give a shit.)

Finally, Mike and Alison would obviously still be regular people, and their kid(s) would go to the school. That one we don't have to think too hard about, really.

So, basically, I think my issues with many of the modern/mundane!AU fics in this fandom illustrate my issues with modern/mundane!AUs in most other fandoms: Removing a character from their original backstory or life circumstance changes what kind of character they are, and when effort is not put into justifying those changes, my immersion and suspension of disbelief as a reader falls apart extremely quickly.

Rewriting any person's life experiences changes who they are on a fundamental level, and I feel that not enough fans put in the work to figure out how they could make their desired AU while also retaining the character's personalities in a way that makes narrative sense for the world they've created, and also doesn't feel like too OOC or outlandish of a choice.

I have no problem with people wanting to write a low-effort fluff fic where everyone's a teacher or uni professor and they all still speak and behave like they're from different points in time anyway with zero in-universe justification, and no one gets fired for being canon levels of awful (or they happen to all just be less problematic than they are in canon so the author doesn't have to write them being terrible). I think everyone should write and post exactly what kind of fic they want to write. ...I just won't be reading those fics, and instead desperately wishing more people were writing fic with a little more thought put into the how and why of their particular AU choice.

Was this whole thought-experiment pretentious of me? Maybe so. But I have standards for my bullshit crack AUs, and I think that you should, too.