Aww, I’m sorry I took so long to reply but I actually went and checked ao3. When you sent this, there would have been 16 fics in the tag. There are now 91, so that’s not terrible!
But I super get your point, this is ripe for fic, it’s left in that perfect place where they’re separated but it’s the kind of conflict that you can play around and work with. Sometimes canon leaves characters SO far apart it’s like, okay, it’s gonna take 90k words for them to even be in the same room, and other times–and I find this HARDER, where they actually have no conflict at all, they should be together and just…aren’t? Like, how do you handle that in fic? “Hey, we should be together.” “We should.” The end. Post-s1 Stepril, you have so much juicy material, and all kinds of ways they can get back together or carry on a secret relationship, or have April react to Sterling putting her dad in jail (that might take 90k words).
Lmao at your comment about how people write HSAUs for characters in their 30s, or say, when they’re warlords in a dystopian future? I remember getting into discussions about why there were so many HSAUs and wondered if it was just people wanting to write away from canon, but, for example, Glee had a ton where they stayed in school. I think it’s that a lot of fic writers actually have experience with high school, sometimes recent, so it’s easier to write what you know, as opposed to hospitals or mysterious warehouses. Even if you haven’t been to American high school, there’s so much media out there based in it and it’s easier to research. It’s also interesting to write as a stripped down archetypey version of other worlds. The popular kids, the nerds, you slot people into simplified positions and try to replicate their original dynamics with way lower stakes.
Though I guess the really good fic, even if it’s a HSAU, goes beyond the basics, because like, look at the world of TBH. Sterling and April are somehow both the popular kids and nerds, and the stakes are certainly higher than they might be. Even if you start with this relatively simpler setting, people are complex. I haven’t really looked at the actual fics yet, but I assume most are canon adjacent and not like, doctor or rock star AUs.
