Is it based on any pre-existing series, or it’s own thing? What kinds of rules do the your stories follow by? Does it have any radical changes to the way certain characters are characterized or retcon any events?
I’ve talked about my Tamian Mysteries series before as an AU of the CGI series, but there’s some finer details I haven’t yet brought up.
Although I never set a divergence point for TM, I started writing it midway through the fourth season (going by US release date). It doesn’t spoil anything beyond the third season, but that may not matter anyway since the show is loose with continuity. And so far, nothing from the fourth or fifth seasons contradicts what I’ve written. As far as a timeline is concerned,TM currently takes place in summer of 2016, with the characters having completed their junior year of high school.
Unlike the official series, where their town is nameless, there are fairly regular mentions in TM that it is Santa Barbara, California. Which we know for a fact is where Bagdasarian Productions is headquartered and where a lot of the show’s scenery is based on.
In regards to the chipmunk species (something you may know I put a lot of emphasis on), I have set some general rules in my AU for how they age, their presence (or rather lack thereof) among humans, and their history. I decided to set Alvin, Simon, and Theodore at roughly age 9 and 1/2 (based on the “7 years” quote, passage of time since season 1, and how young they were when they met Dave in my telling of their origin story), which is equivalent to 16 or 17 years if they were humans, like the ones they attend school with. So they age at a little less than double the rate of a human. The Chipmunks and Chipettes are also the only ones of their species that live in human society, as all others remain hiding in colonies with little to no human contact. And finally, the chipmunk species evolved in North America, have been around longer than humans, and the last great chipmunk civilization, the Tamians, collapsed 20,000 years ago.
And those are most of the things that define my AU. It’s pretty simple compared to the official series, nothing that feels “out of spirit” but I do adhere to these strictly.
