Crossover Fandom

[omorka]

Some fanfic (or even non-fanfic) crossovers make sense because of the meta-connections. For example, I totally understand people who write All Creatures Great and Small/Doctor Who crossovers; the same actor appearing in both series makes doppelganger stories just pop out all over the place. And the relatively small stable of British actors (as compared with the American stable(s)) means that you can then cross over Doctor Who with pretty much any other British TV show or movie. Thus we end up with Snape chasing Barty Crouch Jr. right into a Dalek and discovering whether Avada Kedavra works on an alien in an armored shell, or other such cracktasticness. There are a lot of Angel/Torchwood and Stargate/Eureka crossovers based on the same doppelganger effect. The link between different shows/movies/books based on shared authorship is a little harder to justify in story, but having Buffy kick Jayne's ass or having River staking demons flows pretty easily, even if it doesn't actually make sense.

Other crossovers rely on similarities in setting. My Banzai/Eureka fic-in-progress is an example - both shows play with multiple dimensions and crossing between them, so having someone from one universe pop out in the other can be made to make sense internally in both universes. Similarly, having someone from Eureka fall through an explosion in Section 4 and land, confused, in Cardiff and becoming Torchwood's problem, or the TARDIS landing near Global Dynamics, or any of those continuities have the Time DeLorean show up unexpectedly, all sort of work. Space travel shows can get away with the same sort of thing using wormholes, or (in extremis) Q can show up and mess with everybody's head. (Oh, gods, I will not write Q/Captain Jack fic. That would be so wrong.) Multiple universes that both use magic can have a spell go wrong, and suddenly the Magic User's Club is in a Quidditch game, or Sakura is dodging vampires to retrieve a card caught in one of Giles's books.

You can get away with a shared physical location, if you're careful - multiple stories that all take place in London, or Tokyo, or Los Angeles can overlap when the characters all run into each other at their favorite local coffee shop, or a major landmark, or whatever.

There are, however some crossovers that are automatically crackish. That doesn't mean that they can't make good stories; it just means that they're crack!fic. I would argue, for instance, that any crossover of Marvel comics - either the animated versions, the comics continuities, or the movies - with any Whedonverse is crack!fic. That doesn't mean that I don't want to read about Angel's face-off with Wolverine - no, wait, I don't. Let me try that again. That doesn't mean that I don't want to read about Simon Tam's astonishment on inspecting Bruce Banner; it just means that anyone who writes that should give up any real pretense at this being plausible in either universe. I feel similarly about pretty much any anime (fantasy or not) crossed over with any non-fantasy live-action show/movie; this goes triple for Evangelion. Gaming continuities are Right Out. Crossing over House with ER can work; crossing it over with Northern Exposure can work; crossing it over with ST:TNG is crack!fic even if it's just Beverly Crusher and House never sees the Enterprise sickbay.

And I have to say, I am continually astonished that a number of people who bitch about slash - who gripe that thinking that any character who has never explicitly stated his or her sexuality might be something other than a strict Kinsey 0 is somehow a betrayal of the character - are perfectly okay with crossover fics, and even crackish ones. This tends to lead me to suspect that at least some of them are not really so very much worried about the purity of the characters; that it's really just homophobia talking.

Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I did a Bones/Angel crossover drabble a while back -- it seemed like such an obvious possibility -- and have been slowly cogitating a longer sequel, but whether or not it ever gets out of my head and onto the screen is anybody's guess.