Poll: Crossovers, Oh My

[thefourthvine]

Recently, I was moderately flabbergasted to come upon a Highlander x Yami no Matsuei crossover. I had one of those moments of staring blankly at the computer screen, trying to figure out if I had experienced a sudden linguistic disconnect, and maybe in this language "Highlander x Yami no Matsuei crossover" actually meant "now we all get cake" or something, because surely such a thing, defined as I understood it, was totally impossible.

And then I read it, and realized that, no, it isn't impossible, and I was forced once again to reflect on the fact that Highlander seems to be a fandom that is just very open to crossovers. I know that's partly because, hey, you've got 5,000 years of mostly unfilled Methos backstory, and who is to say he didn't pick up a young Christopher Keller in a gay bar? He could have! He could also have spent fifteen years traveling around with Doctor Who. I mean, it's not like he'd necessarily bring either of those things up in conversation. But also, just, the Highlander universe seems to be unusually smooshy - it is totally willing to cozy up to, maybe even move in with, other canons, as I'm reminded every time the HL newsletter comes out and most of the new stories are crossovers.

Naturally, I got to wondering: what other fandoms are particularly crossover-friendly? And that led, inevitably, to thoughts of those fandoms that are much, much harder to work into crossovers. Which led to thoughts of AUs, which in turn took me to a terrifying meta place, and Best Beloved had to come talk me down. "How about a poll?" she said. "Polls are fun! And, also, you can probably finish one before you fall asleep." (Whereas with actual meta - at the rate I'm currently finishing stuff, I'd have it ready for posting in, um, 2012 or thereabouts, assuming no delays for rain.)

So perhaps you would like to write my meta for me? I offer ticky boxes as incentive!

[Poll #1177790]

Comments

[flambeau.livejournal.com]

I find your poll intriguing! but quite difficult to answer. I usually don't think of fandoms as resistant to crossovers by themselves, only in combination with other fandoms. And even then, there's always the AU option, the fusion option, the I don't care I'll write it anyway option... I mean, even when I think a crossover won't work, I'm apparently happy to write a story to demonstrate why.

(Right now I'm sitting here thinking that maybe a wacked-out crossover idea is what I need to get my mojo back.)

[sorciere.livejournal.com]

I really have nothing much to add to this (it's early...ish, I don't know half the fandoms, and my brain currently wants to go read Methos crossovers all day, despite the fact that I only know him from yes, fanfic and crossovers) but I saw wicked_socks wish for Gundam Wing and Stargate stuff, and I actually found one a while back, except that GW canon there is very, very AU, but here, I share anyway:

Upon A Fiery Steed (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/1792282/1/) by Vathara.

[slythhearted.livejournal.com]

I've always been a fan of crossovers - that's generally how I find new fandoms. I'll be happily established in one fandom, a crossover comes along that looks interesting and the next thing you know I'm googling for archives and searching lj comms to get my new fandom fix.

To me the easiest of crossovers to believe in are where one of the 'verses has an element of 'our lives are secret from the rest of society' ie hunters in the SPN verse, demons in BTVS, aliens in Stargate and TW etc. I think it is possible to create a crossover plot when any of these are crossed with a non secret contemporary universe. Where it gets difficult imho, is when you try and mesh two secret worlds. While the idea of Dean and Faith is scorching hot, the shows have built up two completely different mythologies so unless you go down the portal route there will need to be a lot of explanation as to why demons, vampires, magic etc are so different. Probably the first crossover I read was a BTVS/HP crossover (they were the 2 fandoms I were active in at the time) it's a hugely popular crossover but demands a major suspension of disbelief. Some authors can pull it off, most cant. Likewise while I am a DW/TW fangirl, given the public alien invasions of London every Christmas I find it difficult to get in to a story where the Stargate programme after running for 10 years only just discovers the existence of the Dr, Jack, TW etc. Of course, this doesn't stop me reading them : )

[janne-d.livejournal.com]

I think anything that is set in "present time" and where the world setup isn't completely rigid can be crossed over without too much trouble - so that's pretty much all contemporary drama right there.

Sci-fi tends to be easy to crossover with other sci-fi, ditto for crime series. And as others have mentioned, anything where people have very long life spans or the potential for time-travel is also very easy to match up with other fandoms.

What I think is hard to work are historical fandoms with something modern, or fandoms where the world is very complete and dissimilar in its rules to other fandom worlds - I'm thinking of things like LotR and HP here though I will admit that HP is easier to fit in with other things.

Though these are all for pure crossovers rather than fusions - fusions can probably make most things work, though I think there are some cases where a character from fandom A could not possibly work in fandom B without losing something fundamental to them. Not that I can currently think of any examples...

And of course the final caveat is that a good enough writer or cracked enough idea can make anything work.

[macey-muse.livejournal.com]

Hmm, yes. I'm surprised to see HP scoring so highly: to me it's a very closed 'verse, and intrusions feel wrong; perhaps some of this is due to JK's very anglo-centric cannon. LotR is almost impossible to cross with anything casually: it's too wrong-timeperiod for the fantasy crosses and too fantastical for the time-traveling ones. I suspect, if they had larger fandoms, things like Jordan's Wheel of Time and the Eddings' Belgariad/Mallorean would be similarly impossible to cross.

On fusions: the lovely aiwritingfic has a WiP series fusing Prince of Tennis with NN's Temeraire 'verse. Ai made several of the main characters from tenipuri into -dragons- and still kept their essences. (If this sparks any interest, it's here (http://community.livejournal.com/apples_for_me/tag/au:+dragons+of+the+rising+sun) ^.^)

[bravecows.livejournal.com]

I tried to take the poll, but realised I do not believe in non-crossoverability. :D I think prolly the least crossoverable fandom I can think of is LOTR, but I've done LOTR crossovers on several occasions, so so much for that ...

[entrenous88.livejournal.com]

Wow, it's weird that I have a strong idea that Harry Potter fandom is especially crossover resistant. It's so much its own world, with its own logic. Even though we hear about encounters with Muggles and Muggle-related concerns throughout the canon, which would seem to provide opportunities for this or that character to show up, in my mind it's like, "No, ack, crossing the streams!"

[amand-r.livejournal.com]

Now, that there sounds like a challenge to me. :P

[cereta.livejournal.com]

I lack the brainpower to slog through the comments (although I'm marking for later), but I'll add my general theory here:

Anything whose premise is more or less secret (like SPN, or Buffy, or for lesser values, DW and TW) is easy to cross over. You do have the dreaded explanation effect (which I mostly handle by having it happen off screen), but lining things up is usually easier. Anything where the premise is very, very public (superheroes in particular are bad for this) is really, really hard to cross, because the existence of that public thing would have affected so much about the world. I can manage it for a handwavy snippet, but trying to line up superheroes with almost anything kind of breaks my brain.

Harry Potter falls in a strange between on these, but I can't quite sort out how yet.

[gelliaclodiana]

Other people have said a lot of the things that I would say. One thing that strikes me is that a lot of fandoms that may look easy to cross with each other (e.g. SPN, Buffy, HP) don't work because the blurry spaces at their edges don't match up. This is true of SG1 and SGA as well -- you have to think about how their history is going to match with the history of whatver you're crossing with. Which is not to say that I haven't read some wonderful versions of these difficult crossovers.

I wrote some long (for me) meta on the subject a while ago -- it's here. Very much from the point of view of someone who writes crossovers a lot and loves to read them.

[puritybrown.livejournal.com]

I have a Theory about crossovers, which I will share with you (well, you did ask). I'm talking here about "mashup"-type crossovers; "swirly portal"-type crossovers are another matter.

There are different kinds of shows/books/films/whatever that accumulate fandoms around them. They fall into roughly the following categories:

1) Our World. No magic, no SF elements; everything is as we would expect it to be except maybe there's a different President or a non-existent police department or everyone is unusually good-looking. (E.g.: The West Wing, Homicide: Life on the Streets, any incarnation of Law and Order.)
2) Our World + Extra Stuff + Masquerade. There are magical and/or SF elements, but they are not generally known about and the people who do know about them make an effort to keep them hidden. (E.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural.)
3) Our World + Extra Stuff - Masquerade. There are magical and/or SF elements, they are generally known about and while some of them may be hidden, most of them aren't (or at least, the possibility of their existence is acknowledged). (This is very rare because it's hard to pull off. The only examples I can think of are the Marvel and DC universes.)
4) Not Our World. Wherever the story takes place, it's obviously not the world we know and has no connection thereto (or only a very tenuous one). (E.g. Lord of the Rings, Swordspoint, and I would also argue that the Series of Unfortunate Events books fall into this category.)
5) Our World, But In The Past (Or Future). There may or may not be SF/magical elements; the main point is that there's a significant time gap between this kind of canon and "contemporary" canons.

Now, you can easily do a mashup of any two (or more) type 1 canons, and you can easily do a mashup of any type 1 canon and any type 2 canon. You need to be careful to balance the tones, but it can be done. However, type 2 canons don't always play nicely together, because the natures of their respective Extra Stuff may be incompatible. I think one of the things that makes Highlander so crossover-friendly is that while there is Extra Stuff, the Extra Stuff exists in a fairly narrow range. You have Immortals, and... that's pretty much it. Moreover, because the Immortals are immortal, there's no need to introduce time travel to mash Highlander up with a type 5 canon.

Type 3 and 4 canons are tricky to mashup with Type 1 or 2. Type 4 may be impossible to mashup with a 1 or 2 convincingly; you may have to resort to swirly portals. Type 3 can be done, except you have the glaring fact that nobody from the 1 or 2 canon has so far mentioned the fact that they live in a world with superheroes/magic/what-have-you. As for mashing up a Type 4 with another Type 4... urgh, fuhgeddaboudit. Too much trouble.

Type 5 canons are tricky because if you want to mash them up with any contemporary canon, you have to add time travel or longevity, and in most cases that's not going to be part of either original canon's "rules of how the universe works". So it's likely to feel extraneous and tacked-on.

Of course, once you introduce swirly portals, all bets are off.

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

You just had to mention Jack Chick! Now all I can think about is a Supernatural crossover....

[marginaliana]

*starts chanting "must not take these poll results as a challenge!"*

God, I love crossovers. Although I'm not sure I can top my Snape on the Muppet Show fic which is pretty damn cracktastic.

[esther-a.livejournal.com]

Wow. That is a seriously cracked crossover. Link, please?

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Highlander is the perfect fandom for crossovers because it's a fandom with a small group of people who have special, secret magic that separates them from "the real world", but there's no reason why that special magic would affect anything beyond them, and it has fuzzy enough edges that other kinds of weird stuff show up, too. So all you need to make something a Highlander crossover, really, is to have someone with a mysterious past who's good with a sword, and it just works without having to worry about any of the other worldbuilding.

A lot of people seem to think that *any* fandom with a secret cabal of sf/fantasy believers is ripe for crossovers, but that's not really true, because too many of them extent their special rules to the whole world. They explain *too much*. I'm shocked, fr'ex, that so many people think Buffy/Angel is particularly good with crossovers, because any other universe that has its own magic rules *or* secret government conspiracy is going to a)contradicte something on Buffy and b) be something the Buffy folks ought to know about already. The only Buffy crossovers I've ever read that *really* worked involved swirly portals, which is cheating, or were crossovers with real-world-only fandoms. Similarly, a lot of people try to use Dr. Who and SGA, but any space fandom is going to take a lot of fudging to make its outer space culture match with any other.

Highlander also has long-distance time travel - even it's it really slow and only in one direction - *and* canon-ish AUs - for the purposes of crossing over with fandoms that aren't real-world based - for easy crossovers with non-real-world-based fandoms. (I have a HL/LOTR crossover sitting around based on the LOTR-canon of it being our far-distant-past, and an HL/WoOz crossover using the canonical AU method ...)

That makes it kind of unrewarding to write new-setting AUs, 'cause you can drop the characters in almost any lives or settings you want, and it's *still canon*. And that's awesome. You get to have the AU *and* keep the backstory. I mean, even a high school AU you could do just as well by saying that the Gathering magically turned all immortals into children as by setting up a real AU. Someone should totally try that one!!!

/has spent a lot of time thinking about why HL crossovers are so deeply awesome.

The only fandoms that are better than HL are the ones where canon actually involves lots of crossovers : Young Wizards, Lazarus Long, Amber. Those three are especially good because they have canonical cross-time inter-universe swirly portals + highly adaptable systems of secret metaphysics along the Highlander lines. Alas I can't think of any non-book fandoms that have both. Probably too expensive to film. (Although there ought to be "Wishbone" crossovers. That's even better than Quantum Leap!!!)

[rheanna27.livejournal.com]

My own personal take on this is that the more fully realised and internally consistent a universe is, the harder it is to make it mesh with another fictional 'verse, and the hardest crossover of all to make work is one where both the universes are like that. I have a hard time getting into almost any Harry Potter crossover for that reason, because that universe is so tightly constructed that it never feels to me like there's room for anything else. (That said, I'm not in HP fandom and never have been, so I'm a harder sell in the first place.)

Another factor is how strongly rooted a fandom is in a particular place and time - the more flexibility canon gives about that, the easier it is to bring the sources together without having to jump through flaming narrative hoops to do it.

The final factor is how complementary the tones of the sources are. Two bouncy actiony shows that have a lot of humour and don't take themselves too seriously most of the time would work well together (which is why I have a deep, deep desire for a plotty Who / SGA crossover).

Put 'em all together, and the most difficult, wackiest crossover ever would have to be two fandoms, each with an extensive and consistent mythology and rooted very strongly in a particular time/place, and wildly opposing tones.

Although the wonder of fandom is such that I would bet good money that there is not a single insane crossover I could think of that somebody couldn't rec me a good example of.

[eleveninches.livejournal.com]

I want a DW (+ Jack)/SGA crossover just so someone can make Jack say to Sheppard, "What's a guy like you doing in a galaxy like this?" I have no idea what would happen next, but that line would be gold.

[eleveninches.livejournal.com]

I love crossovers. Especially fusions. I have a hard time buying the fics where someone is ~magically~ inserted into another universe, but I love stories where two (or more) universes are actually the same universe.

My favourite crossover in the world is this Black Books/Torchwood fic: The Fate of the World Depends on It, Probably (http://doyle-sb4.livejournal.com/435276.html?style=mine).

[marginaliana]

Okay, that fic is absolutely hysterical. Thank you so much for reccing it!

[theo-winterwood.livejournal.com]

Couldn't decide which of the last two slots this fit in, so I'll leave it in a comment instead:

The hardest crossover I ever personally took on was due South/Fight Club. But I still think it's sort of a brilliant idea.

[callmerizzo.livejournal.com]

You would think that a crossover with "Oz" would be pretty easy - send your favorite character to prison! It could be anyone! -- and yet, most of the times I've seen it done, it just doesn't really seem to work for me. Other than maybe a few xovers with "Homicide" or L&O:SVU.

Then again, mandysbitch wrote a story where SGA's McKay met up with Oz's Keller (http://mandysbitch.livejournal.com/236208.html), and god, I *loved* that story. So it can be done!

[melannen.livejournal.com]

There's some really good Oz/Highlander crossovers! ...somewhere, I'll have to go find them.

[imkalena.livejournal.com]

I wish I could tell 20thcenturyvole that there was an awesome HP/SGA crossover written by . . . someone well known in SGA fandom, whose name I can't remember because I'm not really in SGA fandom. Also, there was the amazing HP/Supernatural crossover by Astolat.

[melannen.livejournal.com]

isiscolo!! If it's the one you're thinking of, where they discover that magic = ancient gene.

[brownbetty]

I think the rule for crossovers is that you can only have one canon in a given crossover that takes as its premise a fundamentally different world than the one we live in. I mean, this is a rule of thumb, but, part of the problem with crossing Buffy and Forever Knight is that they both take place in mutually incompatible fundamentally different worlds, and this is especially obvious since the fundamental difference turns around vampires in both cases. It's hard to cross over Harry Potter with Buffy because they both have a secret world of magic practitioners, and those secret worlds are really very different. So you either have to argue that these two secret worlds have been existing together in mutual ignorance, or at least mutual indifference, or that they are the same world and squish them together. So it's much easier to cross anything with Sports Night, because at least you don't have to explain why one set of vampires turns into dust, and the other leaves a body.

Or DCU/anything, because one, you have to explain why everyone knows about the-cultural-artifact-Superman and not the Friendly-Alien-Visitor-Superman, and two, um. The DCU.

Although I suddenly had a thought: what if Buffy is, unbeknownst to her, a sort of rogue Agent and Vampires are glitches in the Matrix? SOMEONE WRITE THIS PLS.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

I think SGA fandom is inuring me to any variety of x-over, meld, AU, or anything else. Once you've read illustrated McShep!cookie!slash, there's nowhere left that seems insane. I'm writing SGA/Dragonriders of Pern and it doesn't seem nearly that cracktastic anymore.

[esther-a.livejournal.com]

Actually, that seems fairly workable. the Pern setting is limited to a single solar system in an out of the way corner of space, so as long as you handwave a few references to Earth in the book about the settlement of the planet, there isn't any reason it couldn't be in the Pegasus galaxy.

[featherlane.livejournal.com]

Firefly x Doctor Who!

God, imagine what River would do with the TARDIS...

[macey-muse.livejournal.com]

You know, I'm fairly sure that exists. Or, at least, Jack/Inarra exists. Here. (http://www.altogetherelsewhere.net/multiverse/2007/waltz.html) (I don't even -try- to disintangle NewWho and Torchwood anymore...) Right universe(s), wrong charries? ^.^'

This is <lj user="amand_r"> here.

[wh00ps.livejournal.com]

In my defense when I wrote that crossover, elistaire came up with it. I'm currently writing the sequel, so we'll see how that goes.

I love writing crossovers that I haven't seen before. Then again, it might be because of my vain need to Do Things First.

Someone said Hellsing/Hamtaro, but honestly, I think the thing that might break my brain is Hellsing/FLCL, specifically Alucard/Haruhara Haruko.

[macey-muse.livejournal.com]

I have written a Naruto/Teletubbies (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3155813/1/Snakes_and_Rabbits) crossover. In my defence, it was written with the purpose of being completely and utterly head-splitting. Um. *is shamed*

Also, I have visual proof (http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h268/macey_muse/Stuff%20to%20link%20to/CliffinClouds.jpg) that Ryan Ross is/was Touya Akira. (Who needs crack when you have the world, right?) Thus my fervent desire for a cross. Must remember -not- to start anything along those lines until -after- the blindgo subs...

[eveningblue.livejournal.com]

The most awesome x-over that I haven't found yet is X-Files/Stargate Universe. It seems so obvious: Mulder's been searching for aliens; Stargate has aliens! Occasionally an alien gets loose on Earth; Mulder and Scully should stumble upon him.

Plus their boss, it turns out? Actually pilots a spaceship!!

[green-grrl.livejournal.com]

Yup, yup -- got that:
Jack Lives Here (http://uk.geocities.com/havisham06/fic/sg-thor.html) by Hellblazer. (Jack/Daniel slash)

:-D

[volari.livejournal.com]

I think the most crossover amenable fandoms are especially the ones that are set within the real world. So the Stargates could be going on right now in the real world--but so could Supernatural. And the rest of us normal people just don't know about it. So any of those sub-worlds could cross. To me, something like the Lord of the Rings is so isolated and complete a world itself, that you run into problems of merging worlds, which means something's going to be AU.

Of course, you also have options with say, Stargate, where they do go to other worlds. What they never told you in the books is that Sauron had been a Goa'ould and kept the Stargate in Mordor...

Also, going along with the 'set in the real world' idea, Eureka is probably crossover friendly. Also the crime solving shows, like Bones or NCIS or Numb3rs etc<--could get whole inter-department dramas going on there (No, the FBI gets the case! No, NCIS! Dude, it was a ghost whodunit. That means me n' Sam get it...). Heroes seems to be crossoverable...

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I love it that everyone agrees that LotR is totally crossover proof. Unless you cross Lord of the Rings with the Silmarillion, which is totally cheating. (Methos could crossover into Lord of the Rings. Maybe.)