Essay: On Crossing Over [multifandom, crossovers]

[last01standing]

On Crossing Over
An essay by trolllogicfics

I used to hate crossovers with a violent passion. I felt that, on the whole, they were convoluted messes. The plots were ludicrous, there were too many characters and they just weren’t worth my time. I decided that crossovers were just going to be a part of fandom I ignored kind of like ship wars and wincest. Obviously I’ve had a change of heart since then. See while bad crossovers are about the worst thing out there in fandom, really good crossovers are some of the coolest.

So the question of course is ‘what makes a good crossover and how can I write one?’

First thing’s first. You’re going to want to pick the shows you’re going to want to cross over. This is harder then you might think. You can’t exactly pick a few shows/books/movies at random and think it’s going to work. You’re going to need a point of access. This is a lot easier to find with some shows then others.

The Shows that Travel Well
Some shows are inherently easier to crossover then others—especially if the show’s nature allows for the characters to move around a lot. For instance the show that’s the absolute easiest to cross is Doctor Who. The Tardis can go anywhere in space and time as well as into various parallel dimensions. If you’ve got a crossover with Doctor Who you can go anywhere, have the Doctor and your companion of choice stumble out of the Tardis and delve right into your story, no questions asked. A similar concept applies with Supernatural and the Winchesters coming out of the Impala. Shows like this can roll into any town at a moment’s notice. No explanation is really necessary.

Some shows that travel well: Doctor Who, Supernatural, the X-files, Torchwood, Alias, Quantum Leap, Back to the Future.

The Passing Through Shows
This class of show is an odd group. They’re fairly easy to cross and lend themselves to absorbing other show’s mythology. These are usually shows based in transient places like hospitals or bars where characters from other shows could very conceivable frequent. They are shows based in the ‘real world’ even though a lot of them have some sort of paranormal element. One the whole they are stationary shows that happen in the same place week in and week out.

Some Passing Through: Scrubs, Psych, Chuck, Heroes, Torchwood, Buffy, Angel, most cop shows and detective shows.

The Stay at Home Shows
This last class of shows are the ones you’re not going to want to cross some shows unless you’re basing them solidly in their own universe. These are shows like Dark Angel where the setting is so integral to the fabric of the show, it’s almost impossible to separate one from the other. You can’t have Max and Logan and Eyes Only without having the reality of the Pulse. You can’t have Firefly without being on Serenity. These are the shows, books or movies that have some world building element to them. They’re just not going to sound right if you take them out of their worlds. A crossover involving one of these shows is pretty much guaranteed to fail if you take them out of their home world. I almost never see successful crossovers between two of this type of shows, but bringing characters in from more transient shows is very possible.

Stay at home shows include: Dark Angel, Firefly, Pushing Daises, Harry Potter, Battlestar Galactic, Discworld and Lord of the Rings.

Here’s my personal track record with crossovers:
Travel Well/ Stay at Home: 8
Travel Well/Passing Through: 2
Travel Well/Travel Well: 2
Passing Through/Stay at Home: 1
Passing Through/Passing Through: 0
Stay at Home/Stay at Home: 0

Now my biggest advice to you in choosing your fandoms to cross is this: for the love of God, only pick two. Remember all that mythology and canon and characters you have to deal with? With a two show crossover, it doubles. With three it triples. Make it easier on yourself and limit your scope. If at all possible, limit the number of characters you take along. You don’t have to have the entire Scooby gang meeting the entire cast of Harry Potter. That’s ridiculous. You’ll have cracked 10K with just the introductions. Instead have a young Giles cross paths with Remus Lupin sometime in his ripper days. You don’t need to have the entire cast along. As a reader we get bored with all the introduction and all the explanations. Rule of thumb for characters in crossovers is this—if they’re not important to the plot, drop them. The less people you bring, the quicker your story’s pace is going to be.


And while we’re on story lines...

The whole ‘oh, I fell into a portal and need to get back to my friends’ doesn’t really cut it for a plot in a crossover. It’s a gimmicky way to get two shows together and your believability immediately is shot to hell. You need a believable crossing point for a story. Say maybe Angel and the YED crossing paths during their stay in Hell. Maybe Mulder showed up after the Winchester fire and had a talk with John. Maybe Shawn Spencer got into trouble with NCIS during one of his road trips. Things can even be as simple as two characters crossing paths at a bar. There are ways to cross almost anything and it’s a hell of a lot more believable to just have a chance meeting rather that go the route deus ex machina.

Now the best crossovers I’ve read manage to use this nexus between the worlds as a major plot device. Like a story where Dexter sets his sights on Dean as one of his victims or the Winchesters get arrested and Sam winds up in a cell with Michael Scofield. I personally feel that while my DA/SPN ‘verse worked all right as a Sam and Alec character study, it didn’t really hit its stride until I figured out the YED’s connection to the White and the Familiars. Now don’t get me wrong. This is by no means necessary. There are many awesomely cute crossovers just about random conversations between characters but the ones that always stick out in my mind are where not just the character mesh, but the show’s mythologies.

POV
Point of view is a huge issue to me. When I first started writing, I was a head hopper. Every single scene was told by a different character. Most evidence of this has since been deleted into cyber hell. POV for a crossover is even more essential because with crossovers you’re not just be jumping from person to person, you’re jumping from show to show. That’s just a headache waiting to happen. Limit your POV to one show. Try taking Dark Angel and writing it solely from the POV of Supernatural. Take the Pushing Daisies narrator and set him loose on Dexter. Have JD from scrubs weigh in on some of Buffy’s odd injuries. Maybe Discworld’s Death starts stalking Jack Harkness. Perhaps Indiana Jones stumbles across a Tardis while looking for archeological relics. The possibilities are endless.

Without fail, the best crossovers I’ve read are just outsider POVs on a different show. See, if you do your job right your crossover should be able to be read by a person who’s only seen one of the shows you’re crossing. It can be read as an outside POV on one side or just another every day adventure for the other. The biggest compliment I’ve ever gotten on a crossover of mine was that the reader hadn’t even realized it was a crossover until reading some of the other comments.

Canon
If at all possible, stick to canon from both sides. If the Winchesters run across Indiana Jones, he’s going to be old. Harry Potter is not just going to randomly pop into Serenity because he’s been dead for years. Personally, one of my biggest turn offs in reading a crossover is a laundry list of all the things that differ from canon in your story. If the changes you made are so big you need to list them out beforehand, I’m not going to read your story. I realize this may be a personal pet peeve more then a global one, but you’re story is automatically going to be more believable if you don’t have to mention ninety-seven things that are different before we even start. The only cases I’ve seen where canon fudging actually works is fics where the only thing altered is the timeline, but even those are few and far between.

And I’ll end with a warning; Crossovers, once you hit the right balance are addicting. I went from a person who never ever wrote crossovers to one who writes and reads them fairly regularly in about two weeks. Read the fics below with caution. It is all too easy to become hopelessly addicted:

Recs (most of which involve supernatural because that’s what’s got my attention right now):
A Heartbeat at my Feat by kellifer_fic
Deathly Desperate Dean by frayen [SPN/Dexter]
The Things of Light by ultravioleta [SPN/Angel]
Hearts, Ghosts and Jelly Babies by longhairedlady [SPN/DW]
Stopping for Pancakes by dotfic [SPN/X-files]
The Prettiest Star by ignited [SPN/Stardust]
When Dean Met Bender by glorfinniel [SPN/Futurama]
The Deadly Deal by guns_and_butter [SPN/A Series of Unfortunate Events]
My Supernatural Smackdown by gekizetsu [SPN/Scrubs]
Cellmates by nevcolleil [SPN/Prison Break]
This is How the Universe Ends by shewhoguards [Torchwood/Discworld]
Chuch vs. The Alien by Notorious JMG [Chuck/Torchwood]
My So-Called Afterlife by deranged black kitten of doom [Scrubs/Dead Like Me]
My Blue Box by Emily Tyler [DW/Scrubs]

*NOTE: Crossover ideas without a link listed above are plot bunnies up for grabs.

My own crossovers are located here [SPN/Shaun of the Dead, SPN/DW, SPN/Harry Potter, SPN/Dark Angel, SPN/Pushing Daisies, SPN/Psych, Psych/Pushing Daisies, DW/X-files, DW/Heroes]

And if you’re still looking for more, most of the bigger fandoms have crossover communities on lj. Here are just a couple I came up with:
sn_crossovers, dw_crossovers, heroescrossover, crossoverfic, crossoverfanfic, nciscrossovers

Enjoy!

Comments

[nevcolleil.livejournal.com]

Thanks for these hints! :) Also for the recs and for reccing me :p I've really got to get back to that fic!

[trolllogicfics.livejournal.com]

No problem. =) I love that fic of yours. I just got through season two of Prison Break with my bro (It's a trade off, I watch PB, he watches SPN) and found it again. Good stuff.

[mrsevilpigeon.livejournal.com]

Interesting meta, especially since yours are some of the few cross-overs I've ever been able to enjoy.

[trolllogicfics.livejournal.com]

I'm extremely picky about which crossovers I read and how I write them (as you probably can guess by the meta...). I've found that only certain ones work well. Supernatural for instances on the whole has a much better selection of crossovers then Dark Angel...

[girl-wonder.livejournal.com]

I have to admit, I totally love crossovers - and I think you've hit the nail on the head with the why. It's awesome to have an outsider pov of your show and it's even more awesome if you already know/like that outsider.

[trolllogicfics.livejournal.com]

I love the crossovers too, but as you can tell I'm picky. =)

[girl-wonder.livejournal.com]

I can tell.

Friended you, if that's alright.

[trolllogicfics.livejournal.com]

Yay! New friend always fun. This here's the fic journal. It may or may not be getting lots of posts this summer depending on how well the original stuff goes. I actually live over at spastic_visions if you want to drop by and say hey. =)

[girl-wonder.livejournal.com]

I hear you about the original works. I"m trying to transfer myself, but I keep getting stuck on Dean and Sam, you know?

[trolllogicfics.livejournal.com]

I definitely know all about that. There's always another one shot I can knock off before getting back to the novel...

Fandom on the whole is also a hell of a lot better about enjoying the stuff too. Most of my original stuff gets read by my best friend and my mom and enevitably an editor who feels the story is 'not right for us at the moment.'

[girl-wonder.livejournal.com]

I know. With fanfic, you've got immediate gratification and an audience that gets your work.

Wit original, I feel like I'm writing in a vacuum sometimes. And I have to relearn exposition. In fanfic, we get character we don't need to explain, they're just there.

[yourlibrarian]

Even though I don't write fic I was curious to read this because I think my reaction has been much the same as yours. I think crossovers didn't interest me because I either didn't know one of the canons or they just turned into what I call the "meet cute" format of crossover, where apparently just having these characters in a room together is the main point of the story. However I've read a few SPN crossovers now and it really is a show that plays well with others.

Some good advice here. I'd mention one other thing which is story length. I find that crossovers often work best on a small scale, where the stories may imply larger stories but work primarily as character moments. I think it's because of the difficulty of really putting together a large scale story and juggling all these issues. The only unfortunate thing is that if the crossover works well, it's really frustrating to the reader to get only a small bite!

but you’re story is automatically going to be more believable if you don’t have to mention ninety-seven things that are different before we even start

Agreed, although I'm a little equivocal on this. My suspension of disbelief has to work extra hard on crossovers, even if they're well done. So I tend to look at all of them as AUs. As long as I can understand the premise (i.e., the Winchester story actually took place in the Firefly verse, most canonical facts being adjusted accordingly) I'm ready to go with it.

[trolllogicfics.livejournal.com]

Glad to know it's not just me. =)

I definitely agree with you on the lenght. For crossovers you really don't want an epic unless you've got a super awesome way to tie mythologies together and let's face it, that's hard. Small bites are the way to go on the whole.

I haven't read a SPN/Firefly story that made things work for me. Then again, I'm pretty sure Firefly's just about the hardest show to cross (unless you want to go with a Star Wars crossover). I run into roadblocks as a read and one of the thing's I have a lot of trouble buying is Winchesters in space for any reason. (I think it's the fact that the Impala wouldn't be there. Winchesters without the Impala is just wrong.)

Here from metafandom...

[lyore.livejournal.com]

Oh, crossover recs! *saves for reading*

I love crossovers, and I agree with a lot of what you say here. I do think dual-fandom POVs can work in longer crossovers - it can give you the outsider POV on both fandoms, instead of one. But it needs to be managed carefully, and the POV characters chosen with a point in mind. For shorter works, I agree that, in general, one POV works better.

Re: Here from metafandom...

[trolllogicfics.livejournal.com]

Always gald to help with the recs. =)

I think the POV thing's a personal preference because I'm a third person limited kind of girl through and through. Even while I used to write that crazy head hopping stuff, I've seen the light now, you know?

Dexter/ Prison break?

[tracingdexter.livejournal.com]

Great essay, very helpful.
I gotta ask though, how about a prison break/ dexter crossover? I personally think that dexter can very much go to prison one day, or he can trace one of the serial killers in prison break. I made a short one about Dexter longing to kill T Bag, http://prisonbreakfic.net/viewstory.php?sid=4220
Let me know what you think, and I'm challenging to write something better than mine. No really but I am.

Re: Dexter/ Prison break?

[tracingdexter.livejournal.com]

Also, dexter and Michael are the exact opposite to one another. Dexter; emotionless, no remorse or empathy whatsoever. However Michael tries to blame himself for everything and he can't block out other people's suffering. I think I want to write about these characters one day, after my exams. Sorry to fill your blog with all my comments.

Re: Dexter/ Prison break?

[trolllogicfics.livejournal.com]

No worries, I love all comments, especially when it makes for more fic. A Dexter/Prison Break crossover could be flat up awesome. There might be a bit of trouble as to why T-Bag ended up in Florida (considering Dexter rarely seems to leave) but since he's on the run that would make a lot of sense.

I'm not caught up to speed in Prison Break. I've only seen through 2 seasons so I'd probably not be writing anything there. Is your fic safe for me to read?

Interesting points on Michael and Dexter. I can see a lot of possibilities for the two of them. I hope you do write about them. =)

Re: Dexter/ Prison break?

[tracingdexter.livejournal.com]

Well, there's a bit about season three where the PB guys get locked up in a Panamanian prison. But it's pretty easy to understand, actually it's barely even a fic, just a drabblely idea that I hope would inspire good writers like you, your fics are great. *thumbsup*