No no no, not a modern au, a modernist au. Your favourite characters are hanging around Tammany Hall, getting coked up in Weimar Berlin, and dying as martyrs for socialism on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. They write stream of consciousness novels, direct avant garde cinema, and debate the merits of social criticism as a mode of revolutionary thought. Progress is celebrated, industry is glorified, and art is politicized. History becomes the titanic struggle between nations, races, or classes. Everywhere they go, everyone knows that a war of apocalyptic magnitude is coming but no one is willing to admit it. Worse still, the most prescient among them know that the conflagration on the horizon isn’t truly going to be the end. War will come and war will go, but the ideas and behaviours that make it inevitable will remain etched in the hearts of men who’ve killed the divine and constructed themselves as its replacement. They warn and no one will listen. The band will strike a jaunty tune and your faves will dance and drink and die. The coffee shops and florists and offices will become symbols of an ideology that strains under its own imperial ambitions until it breaks against the shore of history. In the modernist au, framing alone damns your blorbos to either be Kassandra or Agamemnon. Whether knowing or ignorant, the spectre of death looms over them regardless. You cannot write a happy ending to the modernist au because everyone already knows where modernism ends.
