December Talking Meme

[lunabee34]

lyr asked me: What's your little black dress fandom? You know, that fandom you find yourself trying to crossover with everything else - whether you actually write it or not.

I have several answers to this seemingly uncomplicated question. :)

In terms of writing, I am most compelled to crossover the Gateverse with all the fandoms ever. I really enjoyed figuring out how to mesh together the worlds of SG-1 and SPN in my Through the Rabbit Hole 'verse because so many elements of each source canon align very neatly.

In terms of reading, Gateverse and HP are the two fandoms I always search for new crossover fics. Gateverse crosses over so well with procedurals like NCIS because of the military/law enforcement connection. It also crosses over well with canons that are magical, like Buffy or SPN, and canons that are sci-fi based, like Star Trek or BSG. HP obviously works well with canons that contain magic, but I really enjoy when HP is crossed over with canons that aren't magical because part of the fun is A) watching the non-magical characters discover that magic is real and seeing how they deal with that revelation or B) exploring how the non-magical characters might behave if they were magical.

I think crossovers get an undeserved bad rap; I admit that the more fandoms involved in the crossover, the less cohesive the story is likely to be, and I don't enjoy reading those monolithic SuperWhoLockTrekVengers crossovers because they are ridiculous. I also think it's less difficult to cross over fandoms that are very different from each other than might be apparent. I get a great deal of satisfaction out of a crossover that neatly aligns elements from each canon (the Goa'uld have glowing yellow eyes? the demon who killed your mom has glowing yellow eyes?), but I also enjoy really unexpected canon choices, like Murder She Wrote + SGA (Jessica Fletcher is Rodney's aunt).

What do y'all think about crossovers?

Comments

[lunabee34]

Yes! It is all of them in one book.

Actually Josh is here now and telling me he only made it about halfway through because he lost interest around book five.

[tamoline]

Well that's basically at the end of the first series, which is complete unto itself and rather different tonally to the second series.

I think the weird thing for me fannishly about Amber is that I'm not particularly interested about writing from the viewpoint of the characters from the book, generally, but from the perspective of people around them, quite often putative children, and generally with AU twists on the universe. It's probably because I'm coming at this from the perspective of the RPG, where that's the general setup. (But I was fond of one of my Good Wife/Amber fusions where the main character was a lawyer imported from Earth who got sucked into royal family drama and had to deal with all these, um, eccentric individuals in a somewhat foreign to her setting.)

[lunabee34]

Oh, I love outsider POV and peripheral characters. I tend to write fic from those POVs more often than not, so I get where you're coming from.