(FYI, I am swapping the prompts for the 17th and 18th, because the original prompt for today requires a lot of illustration and I'm not done pulling the images together.)
December 17: what makes a crossover work/not work? (for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
transposable_element) [Tumblr crosspost]
The most important thing is that you must not make the characters of any fandom hold the Idiot Ball compared to the characters of any other fandom. Presumably they are all competent people. Let them be competent! This is even more important than power differentials. It may seem impossible to jam together a canon where people can casually blow up planets with a canon that has no fantasy or sci-fi elements at all -- and I agree that that would be very difficult! -- but if you let the unpowered people react like actual people would react in that situation, and let them work to find ways to deal with their relative limitations, you can still get a cool story out of the scenario. This goes for jamming together low-magic fantasy worlds with, say, sufficiently-advanced-technology science-fiction worlds as well. If you respect the characters, everything else can be hammered into functionality with enough time and handwaving. If you don't respect the characters, you're sunk.
(The exception is a crossover written specifically to argue that everyone in Canon A is useless and stupid, and the people in Canon B could fix Canon A's problems in five minutes, but I find those are a very disposable sort of fic: perhaps mildly enjoyable the first time, but with no reread value whatsoever. Also you're going to piss off at least half your likely audience, which is a stupid move.)
Another thing to consider is the kind of crossover you're writing. There are numerous options. Perhaps both canons have always existed in the same world. This can be fairly simple -- say, a cop show and a doctor show both set nominally in modern-day Earth. Or it can be trickier -- say, a modern Earth-like world with superheroes and a high fantasy secondary world with three moons and a red-giant sun -- in which case you have to decide which world is the dominant setting, and how much of the other world you want to retain for flavor. Perhaps your chosen canons have suddenly merged, two radically different worlds smashing into each other; that will certainly provide fodder for exciting plots! Perhaps characters from one canon travel to the other canon, which will have different effects depending on which canon contained the transport Macguffin. Perhaps the characters from Canon A take the places of the characters from Canon B, and act out the plot of Canon B with minor adjustments for their own quirks... or act out the plot of Canon A with minor adjustments for the world-building of Canon B. (Those are typically known as fusions, IIRC.)
Dimension-travel and dimension-merge crossovers don't work very well with non-fantastical canons, unless the story is about the mechanism behind the portal or merge and its aftereffects on the suddenly connected canons. On the other hand, always-the-same-world crossovers can be tricky to sell if your canons have sufficiently different rules of 'magic' -- for example, Doctor Who, the various Star Trek series, and the Stargate franchise all disagree profoundly about interstellar travel methods, the future history of Earth, and the nature of alien life in our galaxy; making them coexist in the same universe takes a LOT of handwaving. (Oddly enough, it is often easier to merge a fantasy canon and a sci-fi canon than to merge two sci-fi canons or two fantasy canons. Their rules are less likely to be in direct conflict.) So you should consider your canons carefully before deciding what type of crossover you want to write.
But those are just suggestions. So long as you keep the characters competent (or funny, I suppose, if you're using a comedy canon) and let them react to the crossover canon in ways that feel in-character, you can smash anything together. Some combinations may not be very sane or sensible, but hey, if we can't go nuts and reach for the moon now and then, what are we even in fandom for? *grin*
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December Talking Meme: All Days
December 17: what makes a crossover work/not work? (for
transposable_element) [Tumblr crosspost]The most important thing is that you must not make the characters of any fandom hold the Idiot Ball compared to the characters of any other fandom. Presumably they are all competent people. Let them be competent! This is even more important than power differentials. It may seem impossible to jam together a canon where people can casually blow up planets with a canon that has no fantasy or sci-fi elements at all -- and I agree that that would be very difficult! -- but if you let the unpowered people react like actual people would react in that situation, and let them work to find ways to deal with their relative limitations, you can still get a cool story out of the scenario. This goes for jamming together low-magic fantasy worlds with, say, sufficiently-advanced-technology science-fiction worlds as well. If you respect the characters, everything else can be hammered into functionality with enough time and handwaving. If you don't respect the characters, you're sunk.
(The exception is a crossover written specifically to argue that everyone in Canon A is useless and stupid, and the people in Canon B could fix Canon A's problems in five minutes, but I find those are a very disposable sort of fic: perhaps mildly enjoyable the first time, but with no reread value whatsoever. Also you're going to piss off at least half your likely audience, which is a stupid move.)
Another thing to consider is the kind of crossover you're writing. There are numerous options. Perhaps both canons have always existed in the same world. This can be fairly simple -- say, a cop show and a doctor show both set nominally in modern-day Earth. Or it can be trickier -- say, a modern Earth-like world with superheroes and a high fantasy secondary world with three moons and a red-giant sun -- in which case you have to decide which world is the dominant setting, and how much of the other world you want to retain for flavor. Perhaps your chosen canons have suddenly merged, two radically different worlds smashing into each other; that will certainly provide fodder for exciting plots! Perhaps characters from one canon travel to the other canon, which will have different effects depending on which canon contained the transport Macguffin. Perhaps the characters from Canon A take the places of the characters from Canon B, and act out the plot of Canon B with minor adjustments for their own quirks... or act out the plot of Canon A with minor adjustments for the world-building of Canon B. (Those are typically known as fusions, IIRC.)
Dimension-travel and dimension-merge crossovers don't work very well with non-fantastical canons, unless the story is about the mechanism behind the portal or merge and its aftereffects on the suddenly connected canons. On the other hand, always-the-same-world crossovers can be tricky to sell if your canons have sufficiently different rules of 'magic' -- for example, Doctor Who, the various Star Trek series, and the Stargate franchise all disagree profoundly about interstellar travel methods, the future history of Earth, and the nature of alien life in our galaxy; making them coexist in the same universe takes a LOT of handwaving. (Oddly enough, it is often easier to merge a fantasy canon and a sci-fi canon than to merge two sci-fi canons or two fantasy canons. Their rules are less likely to be in direct conflict.) So you should consider your canons carefully before deciding what type of crossover you want to write.
But those are just suggestions. So long as you keep the characters competent (or funny, I suppose, if you're using a comedy canon) and let them react to the crossover canon in ways that feel in-character, you can smash anything together. Some combinations may not be very sane or sensible, but hey, if we can't go nuts and reach for the moon now and then, what are we even in fandom for? *grin*
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December Talking Meme: All Days
