Is Hermione Granger still Hermione Granger if she isn't a bookworm?
The answer is, no, she's not.
I'm using Hermione Granger as an example because she is a popular character for a given character archetype, but one of the things I've seen writers do is have Hermione suddenly get a make-over or grow into herself and become super pretty; books—well, they're never mentioned because as far as the writer of that particular fanfic is concerned, they're not important/
And true, Hermione Granger can still be shown to still be a bookworm without books, given her vast knowledge, but when a super intelligent character who didn't care one iota for the way she looked outside of her teeth simply because they stood out, the way they did, it doesn't make sense for her to suddenly be all about books and this person who doesn't have an intelligent bone in her body, her smarts flying out the window.
Which—this is popular in Draco/Hermione stories, of which I am a fan, only of all those stories I really can't stand the "let's give Hermione a makeover" stories because they—well, it feels like putting females into a box, of all looks and no brain, so to say this isn't a good thing to do to her character is an understatement.
What about Harry Potter, though, from the same series? What if the writer were to suddenly make him majorly into books? Would it still be Harry Potter?
The answer is, yet again, no.
And yeah, here comes the usual, "but Yemi, Harry was into his books he got for school prior to starting, and Ron started making a lark about studying, right?"
Well—when we talk about a character being majorly into books, we're talking a bookworm, so stories where Harry suddenly finds a library pre-Hogwarts and is rescued because of books when books did no such thing for him during his primary education when he would have had full access to a school library and books—well, those stories don't make sense no matter how much writers of these stories think they do, but it really misunderstands the characters and why a bookworm is a bookworm.
In Harry's case, yeah, he was into his books. He'd just been introduced to the world of magic, and he did read them.
He just didn't read them like Hermione did, with him not getting Snape's questions while she did, but this shouldn't be forgotten. Harry is more of a skim reader and a reader who likes the pictures than a bookworm type, which is completely okay. This simply means he's more inclined to read something that interests him, has an interesting picture, or that he needs to read rather than reading just for the fun of it.
But--
The reason I'm bringing this up is one issue I see every year is this idea that, hey, because we can do alternative universes for ONC, we can do anything. It's a mistake fanfic writers make even outside of ONC.
But the thing is, this isn't true.
For example, stripping away all the fantasy, supernatural and sci-fi elements from a story is a popular AU type in fanfic. But with this type of AU, it is all the more important to keep canon relationships the same, such as who's married to who, who's brother and sister. Otherwise, all you're doing is writing an original fiction piece where you weren't creative enough to come up with character names for your OCs.
The more you cut off what makes the fandom and characters what they are, the more it is this, and it feels cheap.
That said, if your MC is a character who wakes up as a canon character, that is a completely different matter, right? Because the canon character isn't the canon character anymore, but the MC in their body.
So, definitely food for thought out there for anyone writing fanfic this year. And yes, changing some details and some relationships here and there is okay, just--they should be picked based on the what-if of your AU, not based on random stuff you want to do. Can one have more than one what if for an AU? I don't think so, more of that it can seem that way if one of the changes is a direct result of the what-if scenario, and people think that additional change is also another what-if.
