You???? Torture characters for fun/therapeutic purposes? Heaven forfend!

See again, SG is fantasy so a lot more leeway. I've just never seen much AU in my wanderings through other "reality" based shows. And you're right, it did start early... Hmmm... maybe it has more to do with the fact that for a long time it was extremely difficult to obtain copies of the Pros vids and that a lot of the ff was written in response to other fan fic rather than to the show directly.