December Daily: crossovers

[resonant]

mific asks: crossovers - do you like reading them? Do you write them?

Somehow I never seem to be familiar with both canons at the same time, so most crossovers are sort of lost on me. I mean, you can read them as if the unfamiliar canon characters were just original characters, but you're losing half the charm there.

And when I conceive of a crossover, one half of it is usually a canon that no one knows. Or sometimes, just for variety, a canon I barely know, so that writing it would require a level of research that I'm too lazy to take on.

The only crossover-ish thing I ever wrote was Appetite, which took Snape out of Harry Potter and put him into the body of one of the characters in "Ratatouille," which is the sort of thing that seems like a good idea when you have a kid in the "Let's watch it again!" stage of media consumption.

Comments

[krait]

I'm in the same boat! Maybe because most media-based fandoms aren't my gig, but they're so popular? I feel like most of the crossovers I've read generally featured a large, well-known, media-based fandom I was unfamiliar with, anyway.

I can definitely see the appeal - if you love two things and they have some quirk that would make it interesting for them to interact, it would be a double does of fannish love! On the rare occasions when I read crossovers knowing both canons, that's how it works; it produces whole new ways to enjoy not one but two sets of beloved characters, which I tend to think of as "the joy of the crossover" - it's what I assume prompts most people to write them.

Done well, I enjoy the unfamiliar characters as OCs. (I've always loved a good, well-balanced OC, and in a way crossovers are a shortcut to this - assuming the character involved has been well-written in canon, a faithful author will be able to carry that over, and to me it will read as a fully-fleshed-out OC!) I'm always happy to see an author's note or tag reassuring me that knowledge of Canon X isn't necessary for reading, or provides a brief rundown of necessary knowledge, because that can be a deciding factor for me - it tells me that the author has considered their story from an outside perspective, and is thinking about their readers, not just the joy of the crossover that applies to people familiar with both canons.

[realpestilence]

I'm in the same boat, usually unfamiliar with one of the crossover halves. But if I do know both,
I usually only care about one part; or if I like both parts, I don't want those particular characters involved. ~grumble grumble

[resonant]

Yeah, usually if I like a fandom, I like a pairing within the fandom, and thus it isn't going to make me happy if somebody finds a way to make Sherlock Holmes fall in love with Bert the chimneysweep or Ratty from the Wind in the Willows or anybody who isn't John Watson.

[resonant]

You express the appeal better than I did! I read a nonfannish story once where Mary Bennet (the bluestocking sister in Pride and Prejudice) met Victor Frankenstein, which is a great idea, but the author really didn't do anything with it.