vaznetti | thinking about crossovers

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.