Comrade's thoughts on Crossovers · 12:06pm Dec 8th, 2014
For some reason whenever I think of the Crossover tag as a whole, I am reminded of Frau Blucher from Young Frankenstein.
Hello, my name is Comrade, and I write... crossovers. [horses whinny fearfully in the distance].
When you tell someone you're writing a story, especially in our little not-so-little community of magical horse aficionados, you can expect some mild interest, or at the very least supportive ambivalence. Tell someone you're writing a crossover though, and things suddenly are very different. Frequently I can hear the almost hopeful question asked: "What kind of crossover?" It's a test. The right answers are things that the person is at least mildly interested in, and anything else is wrong. It's hard to think ill of such pre-judging, but it is nonetheless frustrating. We, as a community, have been trained by countless meandering, pointless crossovers that is the literary equivalent of taking a Darth Vader action figure and a Sonic the Hedgehog doll, and then grinding their faces together while hissing, "Now kiss[1]."
In the time I've spent planning and writing crossovers, I've managed to pinpoint what I believe are common failures of the genre, and different approaches that work. Because I've spoken with a number of different people on the subject, and I've grown tired of repeating myself, I've decided to write this blog post to sort my thoughts out on the matter. In the end, these are just my observations and analysis, so take them with a grain of salt.
There are two factors that sit at the core of the crossover: audience and synthesis. I'll address each of these in turn.
Audience
Fanfiction has different expectations and requirements than original fiction. An author of original fiction has to struggle to properly define their characters, and has to develop reader investment in what they have to say. Fanfiction manages to bypass much, but not all, of these problems. Fanfiction gives a cast of familiar characters that readers are already invested in, and are familiar with. Likewise, a fanfiction author can avoid heavy bouts of exposition in many, many cases, because their audience is already up-to-speed with elements of their story. On top of all of these things, fanfiction creates an immediate connection with a pool of readers. Convincing someone to read and become invested in your original fiction is immeasurably harder[2] by comparison. What fanfiction asks in return for these boons is simple faithful obedience. Make sure your characters stay in character, and your world remains recognizable, or you run the risk of losing the reader entirely.
Crossovers double-down on all of these things.
You can quite easily imagine a crossover like a Venn diagram. Each circle would represent one of the intellectual properties in the story, and fans of each. The area in the middle, which is invariably much smaller, would be fans of both intellectual properties. The third group would be the null group—those people with interest in neither. Each of these three groups needs something different from the writer.
The people who are familiar with both IPs make up the smallest group, but also have the most direct interest, and fewest requirements from the writer. If these people are the target audience, the writer can drop jargon like nothing else, and write in all the in-jokes they want. The trade-off is that the story will be borderline inaccessible to anyone outside of that particular niche.
The people who are not a part of either group have no defined interest in the story, and the least understanding. If you expect to write to please everyone, you will have to hold everyone's hand through every facet of both elements of the crossover. You deny yourself one of the most fundamental advantages fanfiction has over original fiction: the ability to unburden the narrative. As such it is very hard to convey all the information you need to in a manner that doesn't alienate someone, and the actual prose is always weaker for it.
The middle ground between the two is to pick a side. Pick one of the disparate "fandoms" to write from, and frame everything for a person who knows some things, but might not know others. In my opinion, this style strikes the best balance between accessibility, and fluidity of prose. The most straightforward way to do this as a writer of horsewords, I've found, is to only have main characters who are ponies. It makes sense for them to not have to think twice about anything that would be normal for ponies, but anything else—read: crossover stuffs—would be foreign and would merit explanation and/or exploration. It's a simple and elegant way to orient and address the reader.
No method or approach is inherently better, except for the one I think is best, which clearly is. Clearly
. Yeah
.
Synthesis
I'm using the word "synthesis" to refer to the method used to actually crossover. I tend to break these down into two broad categories: stories that involve colliding two separate universes, and stories that borrow elements from one and place them in another. I'll refer to these as hard crossovers and soft crossovers for lack of better terminology.
Hard crossovers can come in many varieties. The most common that I have seen have been crude character transplants—put character x in Equestria and "hilarity ensues[3]," but there are many other sorts as well, and it is the more common method of crossover-writing, to be certain. This method encompasses portals, misfired teleportation spells, divine intervention, and all things between. This approach has each intellectual property existing parallel, and then breaking something and pushing parts of them together. The simplest way to tell this method was used is if it follows the formula: It was normal and not a crossover, but then a crossover happened. "It was a peaceful day in Ponyville, but everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked." Boom. Hard crossover.
One common pitfall with a hard crossover is that people get so concerned with crossing over, that they forget they're writing a story. Stories require conflict, and the typical "gobba go back" plot doesn't usually cut it. Usually. The trope I'm referring to is the standard, "Ohs noes, I am now in Equestria! I am not supposed to be here! I gobba go back!" plot. The necessity to return, and the futile desire to undo that which has been done can be important elements and can provide motivation to move a story, but they in of themselves don't do much on their own—alone the entire story becomes a path to negate itself.
Soft crossovers are a bit more rare. A soft crossover takes the central plot and/or conflict, and asks what would happen differently if it took place in a land of magical friendship-horses[5]. Because this method virtually always focuses on borrowing a conflict and extrapolating a story, it rarely runs into the same problems as a hard crossover, though this doesn't necessarily mean it's the superior way to do things.
My (currently on hiatus) story, The Errant Sun, is a hard crossover, and has a fairly elegant, in my opinion, synthesis. In The Errant Sun Equestria is a singular plane of the Magic: The Gathering multiverse, but had been isolated behind a barrier to isolate them after prior extra-planar incursions nearly destroyed them. There are 3 operative main characters: Celestia, Luna, and Twilight. Celestia is jettisoned to the other side of the barrier that separates Equestria and the rest of the multiverse, and meanwhile the same extra-planar force that assaulted Equestria and provoked the creation of the barrier reawakens and threatens to sunder their entire plane. From a crossover perspective, Celestia (horse) is shoved into a foreign land (not-horse), and has her own series of issues, while Twilight and Luna (horses) are still in Equestria (horses) which is then assaulted by a mysterious evil force (not-horse). There are 2 separate conflicts presented: one where a threat MLP fans are not familiar with attacks a place that they are familiar with, and another where a character they are familiar with is thrust into a situation and place that they are not familiar with, and each of these conflicts is viewed by a character who mirrors the knowledge and ignorance of the intended audience (fans of MLP who might not know much of anything about MTG).
There's a lot of thought that goes into creating an effective crossover.
A lot.
I'll finish this blag post by giving some advice that I have no right giving, but hope that will help someone anyhow.
The single biggest piece of advice I can give would be to never lose sight that you're writing a story, and that there is no story granted solely by the virtue of sitting down and writing a crossover. You need a compelling conflict, and you need to push your characters out of their comfort zone. Fimfiction doesn't need another "gobba go back" story where "hilarity ensues."
The next would be to actually consider the audience you want to write for, and to keep it in mind for the duration of your writing. Personally, as a denizen of FimFiction, and reader of fanfiction, I would heavily suggest that you stick with the pony-based approach. Stories that attempt to be everything for everybody tends to overburden their prose, and tends to be rife with issues such as LUS for fear that someone reading the fic won't already know that Twilight is a lavender unicorn. Conversely, it's your prerogative if you want to write a story that is only accessible to the elite few who share your strange proclivities, but I personally don't find such stories appealing, even when I am in the target niche.
Lastly, I would like to double-down and reiterate my warning: crossovers are almost certainly the most difficult sort of fanfiction to write well. You have to consider two vast worlds, and divine how they align, and then amidst the chaos and cacophony, you must find a story worth telling. During the actual telling, then, you must balance on a tightrope in an attempt to properly inform your reader without burdening your prose to the point the rope snaps.
*sigh*
I've just had crossovers on my mind, I suppose. I have almost five thousand words between a few different outlines and planning docs for a crossover I'd like to see the light of day eventually. I'm not going to set a goal for me to fail, but it'd be nice if I could get an actual chapter out by the end of January. I really want to have enough back-end outlining done ahead of time so that I don't get stuck in a quagmire like I have in The Errant Sun, though I do intend very much to pick that back up once I manage to get my head in the writing game.
The story in question is quite different in construction from The Errant Sun, and mediating on the differences got me thinking about crossovers as a whole quite a bit. As a matter of curiosity, people that read this, would you read a crossover between MLP and another intellectual property you might not know anything about? Does the crossover tag scare people away as much as I think it does? It doesn't really change my course, in any case. I have to write the stories I'm interested in writing, and apparently the only thing that makes me want to write is overly convoluted crossovers.
Cheers, and a happy holidays,
—Comrade
[1]—Vader x Sonic is my OTP. Don't be hatin'.
[2]—Bad Horse, though, being the magnificent bastard that he is, could find a way to measure it, I do believe.
[3]—No two words in the description could make me instantly begin disliking a piece of fiction more than these[4].
[4]—"My Little Dashie" is three words.
[5]—You can write crossovers without magical friendship-horses, but it would be a much weaker story than one with them. Same general principal applies to all non magical friendshp-horse crossovers, however.
Oh hey, you wrote that blog about crossovers I've been meaning to write far better than I was going to. Thanks for that.
The Venn diagram approach is my usual method of looking at this, especially for stories hosted on Fimfiction. It's pretty safe to assume that people reading here are familiar with Equestria.
I like to think of hard and soft crossovers as "collisions" and "fusions," but that's really just a matter of semantics.
And I'm available if you want any more help with your card game horsewords.
Good blog. Very good blog. Crossovers--good crossovers anyways--are immensely difficult to write, and consequently are very much a rarity on this site.
Now I want to write something, just to put "Hilarity Ensues" in the description.
Well... I'm a huge fan of Fallout: Equestria, but have never played any Fallout games. But crossovers rarely give you the crossed over content in such a way that it doesn't feel foreign at all; KKat did a superb job on that with FO:E.
When you say soft crossover, I think of this: Whole Plot Reference (tvtropes)
It's actually very common, especially in episodic television. Heck, the Stargate franchise was basically built on this, rewriting movies but with the established characters as the heroes. It was good fun too.
2641082
I actually wanted to mention FO:E. Must have slipped by me while I was writing the blag. It took a while to write out, and I was quite tired by the end. You can tell because I get kind of rambley towards the end.
2640435
If it will get you writing, then have at
!
2640429
I feel like I could have parsed the information better, and perhaps put a bit more in there. The only thing I really managed to do, I think, was give a few things to consider when breaking down and analyzing what makes a crossover tick—or at least things that you should consider beyond what you would for a normal fic.
2640390
I do like those words better than the ones I chose while writing. I recall shying away from them because I titled the section "synthesis" and didn't really want to confuse with similar jargon.
You would think more crossovers would pick the horse-centric approach on this site, but in my experience many either write for the specific niche, or publish the story on multiple sites and try to please all parties associated. Wanting your story to be accessible is a noble goal, but I think we will both agree that it weighs heavily on the narrative—the story is always worse for it. I just hope that this silly little blog post helps someone down the line consider these things when they sit down to plan out a crossover.
And I do fully intend to get back to card game horsewords. I don't know what hit me with it, but I can't seem to write anything for it. I'll make sure to throw you a message when I get back to it. In the mean, I'm going to keep plugging away at this (poorly kept) secret fic
.