thinking about crossovers

[vaznetti]

The crossover meme got me started thinking abut crossovers, how they work, and why I like writing them. It occurred to me that although I write a lot of the things, I've never tried to talk about the process in a coherent fashion. Not that this is necessarily coherent. I'm using a few scenes from that meme as illustrations, even though they're not really full-fledged stories and thus may not always work as stories.

And first of all, I should say that part of the reason that I write crossovers is that I just happen to see them easily. You know those writers who say that they were slashers before they knew such a thing existence? I was a crossover-writer before I knew what it was. I've been playing with the things since at least my early teens. There is text to prove it, alas. All I can say is, thank god the internet wasn't part of anyone's life back then.


What I "see" when I see a crossover is usually something comparable: analogous story types, similar situations, shared tropes or character types. Writing a crossover is a way of drawing those similarities out and using them to comment on each other, generally without forcing the characters to speak or act in ways which are (in my mind) out of character. Most of the characters I write don't tend to talk about themselves, and for me as a writer, a crossover can be the easiest way to bring something about their experience to light. I think this is why I hate the moment one often finds in crossovers where character share their stories with each other. For one thing, it all too often seems wildly out of character, but also I think that the crossover is there for the reader, not for the characters. Or not necessarily for the characters, who may or may not get anything out of the encounter. Too much information can lessen the dramatic irony, and the irony is one of the things I most love about crossovers.

In fact, as I think about the crossovers I've written, all too often nothing really comes of it for the characters. The characters meet, maybe something happens between them, and then they go on their way, back to their own stories. One example of this in the meme is the meeting of Irina Derevko and John Winchester: I think this scene works, although obviously it's quite rough. Almost nothing happens, but it illustrates something about each character -- John's essential recalcitrance, but (more interesting to me) Irina's difficult understanding of her own motherhood. The chasm between them isn't just there because John's not much of a talker -- it's there because he's a parent and she's not.

I'm sure there's something odd about the fact that most of the canons I write for involve adults (usually parental figures) shaping their children, usually in some vaguely unethical way, to serve a larger purpose, but in the meantime it makes for interesting crossover potential. See under: Sydney Bristow and Sam Winchester, bitching about the creepy supernatural figures trying to control their lives, which someone should totally write.

I was writing about how I see crossovers with Rez, and she made the comment that it's everything we do in standard fanfiction, only more so. I really do believe that this is the case.

I think the purity of the exercise is why some people don't like crossovers -- in this they're comparable to OC stories, which of course have a terrible reputation, because of the Mary Sue thing -- but a Mary Sue story is also purely fannish in a way a lot of fans don't like to recognize. That moment of self-insertion, the assertion of control over the source text, the ability to bend it to one's own liking. But a lot of fans have a certain amount of suspicion of out-and-out wish-fulfillment, because too much of that and you're just talking to yourself: fanfic works best when our desires for the source of congruent, and we don't have to think quite so much about the extent to which we're imposing our desires on the source. Genres which seem to acknowledge the desires of the author and readers too openly -- OC stories, AUs, various types of crackfic -- can meet with resistance from fans who don't share those desires.


Hence the need to "sell" the crossover, to make it natural. Even when a crossover seems mind-numbingly obvious to me, I know that I need to sell it to whoever's reading the story. Or at least, I know I ought to; sometimes I'm too lazy a writer and skimp on that. One thing I don't do, though, is write the full background into the story, which makes them less accessible to someone who only knows one of the fandoms. I know that this is a problem but I can't do it without seeming artificial, and I'd rather write a story which I think is good than a story which I think is accessible.

What I try to do instead is make the crossover as natural to the reader as the canon of each source, which I think is why I spent some of the crossover snippets shifting the worlds together so that the characters could meet naturally. In this matter, it helps that I love mytharc and that there appear to be a limited number of story types used by the shows I watch. And that one of them involves Rambaldi, because seriously, you can do anything with Rambaldi. Or the Consortium; possibly the most useful poorly defined conspiracy ever.

So for example, cofax7 asked for Scully with a Winchester, and I started to think about some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario, but most of what I wrote was just getting the SPN universe and the XF universe together -- there was almost no crossover character interaction at all until the very end, and that ends up rather flat because I was so taken by the whole setup. (Although really, the Winchesters as a family ought to make anyone's top ten list of characters likely to set off the apocalypse by accident, right below Fox Mulder.)

Anyway, the point is that getting an audience to buy a crossover, especially one that isn't immediately obvious, can be a challenge -- I think the fact that I can make Supernatural/Firefly look completely natural, even though one of the shows takes place in outer space and the other one just doesn't, is great. Some of the crossovers I write are challenges to myself, because I know that they'll be hard to sell -- usually because the canons just don't match up in some important way.


It might be odd to talk about canon when talking about crossovers, since a crossover is almost always uncanonical by definition (more obviously so than other types of fanfic.) Rez described crossovers as a way of repairing canon to our satisfaction, sometimes, or of expanding a character whose canon existence is limited by more than just screen time.

And I think that this is sort of right. Of course there are plenty of people who feel that "repairing" canon isn't what this whole exercise is about. They talk about expanding canon, or exploring canon -- and I think crossovers do that too, or that they can. And here I think that as I writer I have to be careful about my own wish-fulfillment things, because it's easy to use a crossover to "fix" canon. So for example, I could have continued that SPN/HL crossover with John maybe looking up the names Amanda left him -- either Joe or Duncan -- and things going from there. But I would only be writing that because I don't really want John to be dead, and my guess is that a universe where the two fictional worlds come together makes that less likely. Of course, the way I KNOW that this is pure wish-fulfillment fantasy is that John would never do that. It just isn't in him to go looking to strangers for help; the man can barely speak to his own flesh and blood.

So for me, crossovers are certainly a way of "repairing" canon, but I also like to think that I can do that without violating canon or deforming it to suit my narrative desires. At least, that's the goal. In the past, I've describe my relationship with canon as competitive -- I can't ignore it, but I also don't always like it, because (as I've said before) the interests of the shows producers and my own interests are unlikely to match up. That's the nature of life when you get interested in secondary characters. Crossovers expand the fictional universe enough to give these characters some place to go: it's a way of giving them depth. And of course, although you do need to sell a crossover, it's often easier to sell a crossover than an OC story. A crossover pairing may already seem hot when a reader encounters the story, if the reader knows both canons.

But from my point of view, the key is to expand canon without violating it. (And this, I think, explains some of my own reading preferences -- crossovers which rely on the use of a single actor playing more than one to the characters are a hard sell for me, and I think that's because to me it feels like the author is breaking that fourth wall.) It may be weird to be talking about the integrity of canon at the same time as crossovers, but there you go. I guess I see the crossover as a way of enriching canon -- like any other kind of fanfic. It doesn't come with an opt-out clause, or no more than any other type of story does.


I have the sneaking feeling that I have a reputation for writing crossovers, but it's hard for me to judge that kind of thing. Maybe there are readers who are more likely to click on a crossover with my name attached, but maybe those readers are like me and will try almost any crossover which hits their fandom/character preferences. But at least in a big and scary fandom like Supernatural, crossovers are a way of forming a reputation. Maybe. I don't do it on purpose, though -- I do it because I see them everywhere, all the time. There are too many ways of connecting characters and story types to resist.


So mostly, I like crossovers, and I like the challenge of making them work. Which I think we all knew, going in.

Comments

[destina.livejournal.com]

I think fundamentally, it always comes down to preference and taste. So I always take that as a given. Which would eliminate all discussion, if universally assumed. *g*


B. Even if that were true, so what? If I can get result X via method A or B, why only use method A?

Well, I think from a writer's perspective, which I understand completely my answer would be that you're entirely correct, and limits are a bad thing. But from my fan fiction reader's perspective, my answer would be: because I don't care about the story that comes from method X. I want to read stories that come from method A. And so we're back to preference.

I think that there's also an effective economy to crossovers which appeals to me on an aesthetic level; I like being able to say a lot in a small space, and crosovers are a way of doing that.

See, this I can't picture at all; it seems to me that when you expand a story's realm of possibility to include two universes, you've doubled the chance that the broader the universe, the less well it will be received. It's the intertextual relationship that automatically causes me to discard the crossover, to reach for the coded relationships and hierarchies I know and want to interact with, instead of embracing new ways of seeing it, or the freedom the writer and thus the reader has to see existing relationships without the built-in coding. I think that's the best way I can put it, but it comes down to why I read fan fiction, and what I get from it, and that's generally about a desire to interact with a particular subset of characters.

Whereas I like to see how characters are changed when they're forced out of their orbit. Which may come down to a liking for scenario and plot as well as character.

I love scenario and plot. That's not what I'm saying, though I think I said it badly. Hmmm, how to articulate this. Let's take Farscape and Stargate, an oft-crossed pair that I will never read in a crossover. I don't want to see any plot that could involve Farscape characters superimposed on Stargate characters and situations. I want the situations involving the SG characters to evolve from their own unique universe, from their situations, and I have zero interest in reading anything about the FS characters in the SG-verse, because no sparks of curiosity are generated in me by that possibility. The FS universe is so rich with possibility, and ditto the SG-verse, that I can't see any reason to cross the streams, no illustration of character or plotty awesomeness that would result. One can still force a character out of their orbit and keep them in their universe.

[vaznetti]

...it seems to me that when you expand a story's realm of possibility to include two universes, you've doubled the chance that the broader the universe, the less well it will be received.

By well-received you mean "understood," rather than "appreciated," right? I think that, perhaps oddly, a crossover can actually narrow the focus on some particular feature of the canonical universes involved -- a crossover can make a specific comparison or isolates a particular incident or plot motif. Which is not to say that you can't do the same without a crossover, but it's one tool in the fanfic writer's toolbox, and one I happen to like using.

It's the intertextual relationship that automatically causes me to discard the crossover, to reach for the coded relationships and hierarchies I know and want to interact with, instead of embracing new ways of seeing it, or the freedom the writer and thus the reader has to see existing relationships without the built-in coding.

Do you like intertextuality in other contexts, or is this a general preference? I think what I'd say is that a crossover may not actually alter the built-in codings and hierarchies (particularly when the crossover is over and the characters have gone home, as it were), but it can bring them into question. My character preferences make that appealing.

On your specific example, what I would say is that a crossover which looks obvious from the outside (like FS/SG) is not always going to be fruitful when written out. I know that a lot of people try this crossover, and I've seen it done well a handful of times, particularly when both canonical universes have been completely disrupted. But while the universes are intact it's difficult to pull off, because the edges of the universes don't really meet up well at all -- there's far too much contradiction within the two canons, and (in my opinion) the tonal differences are strong. It's actually a good deal easier to write crossovers between texts which are not quite so immediately comparable. I hate to make the "trust my experience!" argument here, but really, this has been my experience -- the best crossover is not always the most obvious crossover.

[camille-is-here.livejournal.com]

To me, a crossover is about adding an OC or context that I already have a stake in. So my feelings about that person are already engaged, and you don't have to sell me on that person because the character development is already there in my head. Which means you don't have to spend time on the set up and the sell.

But I tend to dislike crossovers like FS/SG because the actors are in both. So right away I am out of the text and into the metatext as subtext. And it makes the piece ironic whether the author intended that or not. Because, like bringing the knowledge of the character we bring the knowledge of a constructed universe and its dissonance into the reading.

A good crossover just lives in the universe it inhabits. It doesn't carry its metatextual baggage like a big rolling suitcase with it.

[vaznetti]

But I tend to dislike crossovers like FS/SG because the actors are in both. So right away I am out of the text and into the metatext as subtext.

I feel the same -- I know I've written one or two crossovers in universes that share an actor, but they can be so awkward. It's like being clubbed over the head with "hey, look! metatext!" which is just not what I come to fanfic for. I like the fictional universes to be consistent in themselves as well as within the crossover, and breaking the fourth wall wrecks that sense of internal consistency for me.

I think that as a writer, a crossover is often a much easier sell than an OC story -- readers come in inclined to be favorable to the crossover elements, whereas they often come in inclined to be hostile ot OCs, especially in a romance. I don't have to make my readers like Amanda -- most of them already do.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah. She may be Mary Sue, but she's the canonical Mary Sue, so complain to the show-runner if you don't like it! (haha!)

[vaznetti]

Exactly! If you don't like Amanda, I can assume that there's something wrong with you, whereas if you don't like my OFC, there's something wrong with me, at least as a writer.