Idea Bank: Rouzing a Good Kamen Rider Blade Crossover

The most recent Obscure Crossover Shuffle on F/F/T3K15 features another crossover with the Kamen Rider franchise, this time with Kamen Rider Blade. Though it's not a fic so much as the ideas for a fic, many of which are terrible.

So naturally I thought up better. Not really a full single fic like last time, more of a foundation. May be spoilers for Blade below the cut; I encourage you to check out the series yourself.

(I realize the possibly hypocritical irony, but there's a difference between posting ideas as a blog post and posting them as a story.)

Kamen Rider Blade uses a playing card motif (which is part of why I love it so much). It stars Kazuma Kenzaki as the titular Kamen Rider, created by (I think) a government program called BOARD to seal away the Undead, truly immortal warriors themed after animals, back into the cards from which they came, using those cards with the Rouze Card System they developed to transform and draw out their power to use to fight them, basically the only thing that can. Along the way, he has to deal with the sentient "Royal Court" Undead that take on human disguises and other Riders that take after the other suits (Blade himself is spades) that could probably be allies if they could figure out how to work together for like two seconds.

What I think would make a good foundation for an MLP and Blade crossover is its backstory - the origin of the Undead.

See, way way long ago, God (in the form of a twisted monolith, it's not fully clear) created the over 50 Undead to battle to determine which species would become the dominant life form of Earth in a contest known as the Battle Fight (or Battle Royale, depending on your translation). As Undead were defeated, the monolith would seal them into cards. The winner of the Battle Fight was the 2 of Hearts, Human Undead, allowing humanity to become the dominant species.

But what if it didn't end that way?

The first problem with the idea manuscript that we riffed was that it crossed over with Equestria Girls. Which, OK, fine, but you're completely missing the potential. Equestria itself presents amazing possibilities in the context of Blade. There aren't humans native to Equestria that we've seen, which means that the Human Undead didn't win the Battle Fight. So who did?

The obvious declaration would be a Pony Undead, but that too is wrong. While ponies are certainly the most widespread species we've seen, there's a bit of bias around the fact the main characters are ponies and the show focuses on them doing pony things. Like most fantasy settings, there's other sentient species that ponies interact with - along with other mundane hooved animals like cows, donkeys, and yaks, there's also dragons, diamond dogs, gryphons, and minotaurs. This would seem to break the basic idea of the Battle Fight in half - there can be only one, right? But this is MLP, where friendship is magic. In a world where problems can be solved by friending hard enough, is it such a stretch that some of the Undead managed to get to know each other well enough to overcome their base instinct to fight and declare peace between each other, and the monolith accepted the result? Perhaps the Pony Undead became the leader of this final alliance, allowing it to compensate for its rough weakness compared to the others by getting more territory, if there needs to be a reason for ponies to be more spread out compared to the others as a function of something besides the sheer amount of time.

"But there's no such thing as a Pony Undead-" Shush. That's the second problem with the idea manuscript: it attempted to cram in all the canon Undead, no matter how little sense it made. Canon is a tool used provide recognition to help tell a story, not a goal in and of itself. In order to cross Blade with pony, there needs to be an Undead that allows for sentient ponies. The number of Undead has to be the same (50+, one for each playing card), but what species those Undead represent can be left to the author. Perhaps the Pony Undead is this world's 2 of Hearts? In order to combine something as relatively grim as Blade with pastel talking horses, religiously sticking to one canon is a recipe for disaster; both sides have to give and take to adapt to each other in order to produce anything that doesn't make the reader regret their life choices.

An example of this adaptability is Friendship is SHOWTIME!! by MangaKamen, a crossover with Kamen Rider Wizard and perhaps the best Kamen Rider crossover I've read to date. It doesn't paste characters from one show over the other, but integrates the rules of Wizard mostly seamlessly into MLP season 1. Wizard himself is present as a dragon of teenage build, but none of Wizard's side characters because he's friends with the Mane Six instead, so the cast isn't overcrowded. Many of the Phantoms (the monsters of that season) are new creatures that match the mythological theming of the canon Phantoms, complete with lampshades about how there are phantoms of actual Equestrian creatures, and they don't seem out of place compared to the canon Phantoms that are present. Twilight figures out how to use Wizard's magic rings on her own, as well as the rings of the show's second Rider with hilarious results. The events of the season play out similarly enough so as to remain familiar, but differently enough that its clearly making good use of the mechanics of Wizard - for example, Gilda's mean disposition and hoarding of Rainbow Dash is the result of years of torment by the Phantom trying to break her; the end result is that they're still fresh to read even though we've seen the episodes of the show before. It even manages to circumvent ~let's redo the pi-lot~ by having its AU branch point be after "The Ticket Master." The main issues are mostly in typesmanship errors, using the eye-straining pre-update color palette for the first half or so, and shoving in a ton of other Riders from other series as well as Super Sentai in side-arcs and the main arc that takes place away from Ponyville to the point it kinda feels overcrowded sometimes and you have to wonder how they've managed to keep anything secret before this point. Like, I appreciate the Kiva cameo, but did it really have to be there when one of the main characters that arc was a Magiranger? But aside from that, it's an amazing story, good enough it doesn't matter that Wizard is one of the least well-received series in the West, and it's a tragedy it stopped updating in May 2015.

A good Blade crossover should be able do the same as that fic does with Wizard. Adopt the mechanics of the Undead, the Battle Fight, and the Rouze Card System to the world of ponies, but not necessarily the specific characters. Find a pony that wants to protect people to be Blade - a canon, a background pony, or perhaps just have Kenzaki as a pony but with an adopted backstory to match the setting. How does this character relate to the Mane Six, and how are their lives influenced in turn? Same can be asked of the other three Riders. Themes of friendship can help find a way for the four Riders to work together in spite of their vast differences. The Undead can have a more mythological bent to represent the creatures that populate Equestria, like hydras, timberwolves, phoenixes, and of course ponies, dragons, and gryphons. How did the Undead wind up being unsealed? The Rouze System could have been created with applied magic as the original was with applied technology. What makes someone qualified to be a Rider and how that can quality increase?

Something amazing can come of this. You just have to freakin' try.