I love/hate Displaced fics

I've been reading quite a few of these lately, and I gotta say, I love the concept overall. The idea of getting to go to Equestria while playing as another character, having their powers but doing what you would do in that situation instead of them, I love it. There's just one teensy weensy little problem they always have: the crossovers.

See, the crossovers always involve using another series that often times isn't even one made by the same company, which means a high likelyhood of it being one that fans of the main source aren't a fan of. I can't count the number of times I've been lost and confused by some new franchise getting mashed up and ultimately feeling distracting from what I came for. If I came to read Megaman, I didn't come for Kingdom Hearts, you know?

I know the whole thing with Displaced is that there's tons of universes going through it and they sometimes intermingle, but honestly... I wish they wouldn't. I wish the universe of the story could be self-contained and not expect me to just understand what's going on with a franchise I didn't click on the story for. I don't watch Dr. Who, so obviously I don't read crossovers with that, because I wouldn't understand it. The same applies to Displaced crossovers. I clicked on the story because the main source was something I understood and wanted to see in Equestria. Putting something else in sours the experience. I asked for strawberry ice cream, please don't mix your rocky road with it.

I don't think I'm gonna be able to get anyone else to change, but I can promise this, if I was gonna ever try to write such a story, I'd stick to one source.

Comments

[Camlio]

As a writer (semi retired HERE due to an apparent lack of creative interest in horsewords) of displaced fiction I can say I'm 100% behind what you're saying especially since like in my case the stories you've collabed with have either been cancelled or gotten so far ahead while you haven't updated you feel like you're the one holding them back.

[ssokolow]

I'm not a huge fan of Displaced fics, because I prefer that a character either be an OC or actually be the character they're playing. (Being an OC playing a familiar character generally leads to authors getting lazy about making their characters engaging in my experience.)

However, I do agree with your comment about crossovers. In fact, over a decade ago, I managed to come up with two simple pieces of advice that also explain why it's so hard to write a really satisfying multi-crossover of any kind:

First, as an author, you get one "gimme"... one "and lo, the author reached down from the heavens and touched the narrative with his mighty finger" that all other changes from canon should causally ripple outward from. This "divergence event" has to explain how your two settings came into contact and it's hard to use a single event as a sufficiently satisfying justification for combining elements from more than two source series. (Though Displaced is actually better than usual in this respect, since it can be explained as "who/whatever took the OC into Equestria also pulled the details of their costume from their memories", so there's no need for all three settings to exist and "be adjacent, despite potentially wildly divergent tones" in the same multiverse.)

Second, it's simply a matter of available time. The more elements you mix into a single story, the less time you have to spend exploring any one element. That's actually why I prefer Bleach fanfic over Bleach itself. Tite Kubo was great at producing interesting characters, but he produced so many that there was never enough time to explore and develop each individual one as much as I'd have liked. Good writing could be said to be measured in units of "coherent novelty per unit word". The very best fiction gives a strong sense of being unpredictable going forward, but "of course! Why didn't I think of that!?" in hindsight... or, in the case of fanfiction, also "of course! This makes so much sense! Why did no other fanfic think of this!?"

(This is where my problem with OCs playing familiar characters comes in. The "playing familiar characters" aspect constrains the OC's ability to be novel and lures the author away from giving them interesting depth, and the "OCs playing ..." part means that, by definition, it cannot ride on my interest in the characters that they're playing because they're not the same characters.)

I suppose you could say that I see Displaced itself as "I asked for strawberry ice cream, please don't mix your rocky road with it."