So I just rewatched Your Name, and I thought of a few potentially interesting AU ideas.

-What if, when Mitsuha visited Tokyo, something went wrong - maybe she missed her train, maybe transportation was temporarily shut down or something - and she got stuck there instead of returning to die in Itomori? What sort of story could you get out of that, with her displaced, her home destroyed, and three years to go before her primary ally knows enough to help? (Would they still be able to pull off some sort of time shenanigans to save Itomori?)[A thought: Taki’s perspective would probably diverge with him calling Mitsuha after the date and her actually picking up, since her phone could still be in service in this timeline. Or it could have been canceled if she couldn’t find a way to pay for it, I guess, but hey - why waste a perfectly good excuse to bring them back together once the dreams are over and can’t be interfered with?]

-What if Taki didn’t get the idea that Mitsuha could succeed where he failed, and went to Mitsuha’s death for her so that when she wakes up in his body at the netherworld-crater-shrine-thing she’s given a second shot at life as him?

-By the black moment of the film, where both Saya and Tessie have been caught and the meteor is falling, Saya and the people sent to capture her were outside the blast radius. I think it could be interesting to see a story where Mitsuha couldn’t save the town but Saya survived thanks to already being in the high school, following her attempts to cope with the failure of the save-everyone plan. Bonus points if an excuse can be found to not deal with the memory-erasure (maybe because the purpose of the dreams was never completed? I dunno), so that she can eventually meet a Taki who blames himself for the plan failing.