I've been thinking about crossovers a lot lately. While I'm a fan of them in general, they seem to be one of the more difficult kinds of fanfic to do well. So, a question I'm throwing into the wind: What are your thoughts on crossovers?
What do you like in them? What do you dislike? What are your bugbears? Your pet peeves? Your weaknesses? If you have experience writing crossovers, what do you find the challenges to be? How do you overcome them?
Note: these questions are specifically aimed at crossovers, not fusions. But, if you want to talk about them, that's fine too.
9/10/2011 #1 ReportI'm a huge fan of crossovers, but they are rather tricky to get right. It's the reason why I've only written one, and I'm kind of dragging ass with writing it. Mind you, I tend to classify fusions as just a really specific kind of crossover and not a seperate thing.
When I'm writing a crossover that deals with two variants of the same supernatural species, say...Vampire: The Masquerade and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, rather that trying to mash the two mythologies into the same world I'll adapt one world to fit into the other. This can make for some fun lore rewriting. One plot bunny I had was the Slayer being created by the Camarilla to hunt the Sabbat. That's not a terribly good example, but one of the simpler ones that came to mind. The great thing about Teen Wolf is that it's already established that there are different werewolf breeds. I've probably mentioned this before, but I found that this leaves the fanon world open for including other werewolf mythos.
One thing I'm pleased with is the fact that we're not really seeing an overload of Twilight and Vampire Diaries crossover fanfiction. In those early days when I realized that Teen Wolf was going to be really popular but before FF.net had their TW section up I was expecting the Xover section to get drowned in them. But when you add them all up they only really come up to around five stories between the two fandoms.
9/10/2011 #2 Reportand I'm kind of dragging ass with writing it.
Are you talking about the Wolf Lake one? Because that really does need its next chapter up :)
Mind you, I tend to classify fusions as just a really specific kind of crossover and not a seperate thing.
The full on fusion is a new thing to me. I'm separating them because I think there are different skills involved in making them work. A simple crossover is a joining of at least two universes. Some selective ignorance of things in the universes may need to happen for the joining to occur, but overall it does require stitch-work and care to explain, for example, how TW style werewolves suddenly exist in Buffy world, even though we know exactly what the Buffy style werewolves are, and they don't match. There also needs to be a provided explanation or some sort for how the characters from one show know the characters from another. A fusion, as I understand it, transplants the characters and some concepts from one universe to another as if they were always a part of it. Though I've never tried one, in concept a fusion seems easier to me than a crossover, at least in terms of story construction.
One of my crossover pet peeves is when our two groups of characters meet and almost immediately trust each other enough to spill all their secrets. Paradoxically, one of my favorite things about crossovers is that part of the story where the characters share their secrets. I guess I just want the outing to be earned, and maybe for it to keep needing to be earned in a "You suspect I have secrets, but I'll only reveal them on a need-to-know basis, and you don't need to know" kind of way.
9/10/2011 #3 ReportAre you talking about the Wolf Lake one? Because that really does need its next chapter up :)
Yes, I post the second chapter, it's really kind of Prologue 2.0 though. Did you read it?
I'm kind of getting cold feet over how I've intigrated Scott and Stiles into Wolf Lake. Hence me dragging ass.
One of my crossover pet peeves is when our two groups of characters meet and almost immediately trust each other enough to spill all their secrets. Paradoxically, one of my favorite things about crossovers is that part of the story where the characters share their secrets. I guess I just want the outing to be earned, and maybe for it to keep needing to be earned in a "You suspect I have secrets, but I'll only reveal them on a need-to-know basis, and you don't need to know" kind of way.
This, definitly. I do recall a parody fic in which Buffy walked through a Stargate into the SGC and shouted her entire life story to SG-1...and then calmly walked away. Was funnier in context.
9/10/2011 #4 ReportI read the second chapter right after it went live. I think your story is one of the very small handful that I have on alert.
I do recall a parody fic...
That sounds hysterical. You don't happen to recall the title, do you?
9/10/2011 #5 ReportOh...I am flattered. :) Part of the reason Dogs of War is kind of stalling out is because I'm honestly getting cold feet about how I decided to introduce Scott into the story and I'm considering just going back to square one on the whole chapter.
As for the parody fic, no I don't recall as it was quite a while ago. And I got linked to it via a forum I am no longer welcome on for reasons of...reasons. _
Anyway, there's a serious defency of Teen Wolf Crossovers. Although I feel that there's a serious defency in Teen Wolf fics in general.
9/10/2011 . Edited 9/10/2011 #6 ReportIt's a good story so far :) Go back to square one if you must.
There is a serious deficiency of TW xovers (and stories in general). I deeply want to write an xover but don't feel that TW would work well with most of the shows with which I'm familiar. Or, rather, beyond the "and now the characters exchange their secrets" part, I don't have a story to tell.
Edited to add: I've just posted the first in what I hope will be a series of crossover ficlets.
9/10/2011 . Edited 9/11/2011 #7 ReportI wound up scrapping what I had for chapter 1 and just rewriting the whole thing. I also took a completely different path with Scott's pre-cursed storyline. A bit more in line with his canon characterization I think.
Yeah, now that the season's over, we could be looking at a serious dryspell as far as new fics go considering how new the series is. The fandom is a bit nebulous at the moment.
X is great fun, I'm unfamiliar with the Tomorrow People, but I always enjoyed Forever Knight. It was good to see such a crossover that didn't wind up with a weeny wagging contest between vampires and werewolves. It was subtle, but said so much.
9/22/2011 #8 ReportForever Knight was a hard show to work with because of how the series ended. One of my goals with the X series is to keep the timelines consistent, which is ... interesting. Most of the shows for which I've written fanfic have been off air for well over a decade, so that time has to be accounted for.
Spiga, I'm glad to hear that the FK one worked for you. It was the most difficult of the three because of the parameters I had to work with, chief amongst them being the need to address both sides of the crossover without LaCroix flat out telling his side of the story.
BTW, if anyone (Spiga, Fountain, etc.) want to contribute to, or model shamelessly on, the X series, feel free. I'm working on a Doctor Who one, but I'm not sure if it'll manifest. Personally, I'd love to see more of these crossover snippets. The shortness of them is neat for getting to play with the two universes without having to set up or maintain a whole story.
As for fanfic dryspell: I'm not so sure. There's a fic exchange that just went out. Got my assignment yesterday. Those are due to be posted in the first part of December. There's also a Big Bang running (both of these are via LiveJournal), and those are due to be posted in December. Then there'll be YuleTide, which is bound to produce some fics. I think we're in a bit of dryspell right now since the American academic year just began and everyone who's a student or teacher is adjusting to their new schedules (goodness knows, I am).
As always, I'm just hoping that story variety will happen. I'll keep pounding away on my stories. Almost everyone on my personal alerts list has updated in the past week, so I guess that makes it my turn. :)
9/22/2011 #9 ReportDoctor Who?
*diesofhappiness*
I'd love to read that.
I like reading crossovers but at this point, I don't think I could successfully manage to write one. The only one I could possibly think of trying would be a Buffy or Angel crossover, but again, you run into the problems you stated before - how to reconcile the Buffy verse weres with the TW weres. Hmmm, maybe Sunnydale just had omegas running around rampant...then again, the season 8 comic had Oz pretty much cured or in control or something. I have to reread that and think up the possibilities.
9/23/2011 #10 ReportIt has to get finished, first. And right now I'm running about 0/10 on that front. I'm also toying with a Lydia, the Vampire Slayer one, but can't yet get my head around the story's core.
The nice thing about the ficlet format is that it allows all the hand-waving necessary to just get the characters where you need them to be. The bad thing is that a lot of story formats don't work. There's not much room for action/adventure, for example. So whatever is going on in the story has to be precise and self-contained. And, wow, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad one that I treat every single fanfic outing as a writing exercise.
9/23/2011 . Edited 9/23/2011 #11 ReportHaha, I hear you on that front. Too many ideas, no where near enough time to execute all of them.
9/23/2011 #12 ReportIs anyone still reading this? ??? I really like the cross overs. I'm not a writter, but I can see where they might be hard to combine. I'm a fan of TW and Hawaii5-0. Fic,and thought it might be interesting to have Danny and Stiles go to Hawaii. (Oddly enough, Keahu (Danny) was actually on H50 tonight)..
8/27/2012 #13 ReportI love crossovers! They're practically the only thing I write on here, actually. My favorite type of crossovers for Teen Wolf would be Vampire Diaries and NCIS, as those are my other two favorite shows.
They're not hard to combine really, in my opinion. Like for a Teen Wolf/NCIS crossover, since Abby was adopted, her biological parents could be the Hales but she wasn't born with the werewolf gene. She goes to Beacon Hills to meet Derek (possibly Peter as well) and winds up involved in everything going on in Beacon Hills. Or there could be a bunch of Naval and Marine deaths happening in Beacon Hills and the team goes to investigate, finding out about werewolves, kamina's, and hunters along the way. But I can see where it would be hard, especially if you're crossing it over if a fandom that already has werewolves, like The Vampire Diaries. In that case, you could always have it come back to do something with the witches. Or you could do what I do and have a character from Teen Wolf move to Mystic Falls or have a character from Vampire Diaries move to Beacon Hills. (Now you guys probably hate me for mentioning Vampire Diaries here.)
What I find difficult about them sometimes is making sure all character's from both fandoms are in character. One thing I really dislike is when the fandoms are crossed over unrealistically or the character's automatically spill their secrets when normally on the show they wouldn't. A pet peeve is characterization and how well written the crossover is.
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