Last year's Multiverse

[selenak]

While we're all waiting for the Multiverse 2005 stories to be released, a few not too original thoughts about crossovers, and what makes them work, or not.

To me, the trickiest part of a crossover is how it handles the exposition question. Because obviously, if you let characters from show A meet characters from movie B and repeat all the essentials about both worlds in either dialogue or narrative voice, you're boring your readers, who presumably already know either show A or movie B, or both. On the other hand, some essential knowledge has to be conveyed, not just for the readers but for the character's sake. A character who ends up in an entirely unfamiliar environment and doesn't question what the hell is going on is implausible.

In last year's Multiverse stories, one of my favourite crossovers was a Firefly/Farscape one, "Crosses and Naughts". It is set in the Firefly universe, and has at its core Mal Reynolds meeting Aeryn Sun, one of the main characters from Farscape. Now, the author doesn't make the mistake of letting Aeryn tell Mal her entire history, complete with descriptions of the FS gang and the political backstory of the Unchartered Territories. It would be out of character for Aeryn, and it's not necessary for the story; I believe that if you haven't seen a single episode of Farscape, you still get a good idea of what Aeryn is like, and can make some educated guesses about her background and what happened to her, based solely on Mal's observations and reactions. Conversely, Mal is a character who talks more but is actually even less inclined to tell really painful and important things about himself to anyone. However, the story is written in his pov, and so we find out a bit of what is haunting him - when it's appropriate for him to think of it in terms of storytelling. Bits of backstory that do not matter for this story, like, say, the crews encounters with Saffron, do not get mentioned. (That's another danger of crossovers - the writer liked episode X so much episode X gets namechecked even though it has squad to do with the subject of the story)

Another difficulty of crossovers is that different fictional universes have different rules. And sometimes they appear to be incompatible... at first glance. In this particular example, Firefly, like the new Battlestar Galactica, doesn't have Aliens. Farscape practically consists of them, with just one human in between. However, Aeryn's species, Sebaceans, look human, and thus a lengthy "non-human lifeforms do exist? No, really?" scene for Mal is superfluos. Had the challenge been for him to meet Chiana or D'Argo, that would have been another matter.

Leaving aside space shows for a moment, one of the most ingenous crossovers I remember reading was a Harry Potter/BTVS one by marinarusalka in which young Rupert Giles and Ethan Rayne stumble into the last war against Voldemort in the early 1980s. Magic in HP is quite a different thing from magic in the Buffyverse (where practically anyone can learn how to use at least some of it, though it takes talent and practice to manage more than a few tricks). marinarusalka made that difference work for her not by ignoring it but by using it; in her story, both Dumbledore & Co. and Voldemort get interested in Giles and Ethan because these two use magic not bound by the rules of the wizarding world. I loved it.

Now, back to waiting for the release of a whole new bunch of crossovers...

Comments

[lakrids404.livejournal.com]

Yes I agree Marinarusalka has written one of the very few Harry Potter/Buffy fanfic that works. The number of Willow!sue that I have seen in Harry Potter fanfic, are rather annoying. I don’t if you know Marcus L. Rowland (http://home.att.net/~lubakmetyk/crypt.htm#rowland), he writes range of BtVS crossovers sometimes with some rather obscure fandoms. I can recommend him you like a well-crafted crossover sometimes fic. His writing style do I find solid but perhaps a little dry.