covid

Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies (originally posted on Substack)

In other words, you know this song.

Annie Nazzaro

Annie Nazzaro

— 5 min read

An alternate universe

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

In fanfiction, it’s popular to take a story you love and transfer the characters to an alternate universe, or AU, of your own making. An AU can mean a change of setting, like a modern AU (for previously fantasy/historically set stories) or a coffee shop AU (aka, the story is now a workplace sitcom), but it can also be a concept, a grand what-if-instead.

Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies is one such common concept. As you can guess, this kind of fanfic takes what had once been a tragic story and says, what if it ended happily? What if no one had to suffer a meaningless loss? What if everyone is redeemed, no one is left wanting, and we all get what we deserve, which is just more time?

This type of AU is particularly popular in media like Fire Emblem, a series of games which features a large casts of characters in each installment and permadeath as a main mechanic (once a character dies in a level, they aren’t revived for the next; they’re gone forever). More recent installments have presented story paths which require you to pick a side in a war, meaning that in one route you end up fighting against and killing all the characters you got to know and fought alongside in another. Fire Emblem: Fates offered two main routes in that format, but added a third DLC path in which the two sides can band together to fight a greater, ultimately evil enemy. Funnily enough, if you play it right, it functions as its own canon Everybody Lives/Nobody Dies AU – for once, you can save everyone you love.

I never enjoy reading these AUs. The very existence of this concept makes me want to cry. It’s so human, to wish to undo the terrible things that have been done. To rewind and say, this time, it will all turn out okay. I can’t bring myself to read them because what was originally on the page or on the screen is too clear; I can’t let myself pretend, even for a little while, that it didn’t happen. I can only experience Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies as bittersweet at best, because it’s an exercise in imagining what could have been, rather than a new reality to replace the one we were given. Only the sanctity of canon can help me get over that bittersweetness. (I have no trouble accepting Fates’ third route as a true ending to the game.)

Yet I still appreciate the exercise. I even appreciate the naming of the trope – other names for it can just be “Everyone Lives” and “Nobody Dies” as separate entities, “Everyone is Alive” or “They All Live,” sometimes even the more oblique and not a bit ironic “Everything Is Beautiful and Nothing Hurts,” but most commonly the tag on fanfiction sites these days unites the first two. It doubles down. The slash between them operates as an “in other words,” but it also says, in case you weren’t sure, everybody lives and nobody dies. You’re completely safe from tragedy here.

We’re already in October 2020 now; the country has been on some form of lockdown since March. In the past seven months, 205,000 people have died of coronavirus in the US. In the past year, 999 people have been shot and killed by American police. More than 30 people have died in the past few weeks in wildfires on the West Coast. None of this had to happen. I keep running over it all in my head. If President Donald Trump had taken the coronavirus seriously at the beginning of the year. If he had let the experts take charge. If he had had a plan, if he had deployed that plan in a manner that led all states to follow suit and mitigate the suffering, if the plan worked. If Donald Trump weren’t our president at all. If our lawmakers on both sides could have just passed a bill to truly support people and businesses in getting through this, stigmatization of handouts be damned. If our institutions had taken George Floyd’s death or any other death of a Black person to police violence as the horrors they are, and had been replaced and reformed accordingly. If decades ago, when there were first reports on industrialization and fossil fuels’ effects on the planet, those with the power to do so had done what was right and steered us toward sustainability. If those people in San Bernadino hadn’t set off fireworks at their gender reveal party. If they hadn’t held a goddamn gender reveal party at all.

In other words, you know this song. If everyone lived. If nobody died.

But 2020 is not just a series of unfortunate events; it’s a consequence. It’s the culmination of every bit of suffering, human and environmental, that has been ignored or exacerbated to the benefit of the powerful up to this point. The pandemic at least wasn’t a human creation, but it was something we could have been prepared for, and in the past have been better prepared for. When I think of the rewrites I would make in my Everybody Lives/Nobody Dies AU for the year, what I really want to do is not just fix 2020 but redo centuries of history. And I can’t.

I don’t like reading Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies AUs because even as fiction they feel futile. My deep, fervent wish to rewind time and undo all this real-world suffering is even more so. But I believe at least that this exercise in fiction, this impulse, is one we do need in real life. Not the part where we try to overlook or cover up or rewrite history as if tragedies didn’t happen so that we don’t have to face them. The part where we hope for better, look at what occurred, see how things could have turned out differently if we tried, understand how much of it was luck, and redo the parts of it that we can. We should want to mitigate human suffering. We should want good people to have good things happen to them. We should care enough for each other that we wish to undo or stop violence where it occurs. We shouldn’t suffer meaningless and preventable loss, and if we do, we should work to prevent it from happening again. It’s one thing over and over, but it’s also one thing and then something next. Tomorrow could be better. We should want it to be.

It’s worth mentioning that the opposite of this fanfiction trope is also quite popular, Everyone Dies / Nobody Lives. Because sometimes readers just want to marinate in tragedy. I don’t enjoy fanfiction of that variety either.

Links and recommendations:

Til next time.

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