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A Brief Guide to the Writing of Crossovers, Part 1 of 2
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dragonwhishes requested it...
A Brief Guide to the Writing of Crossovers
In my guide to How To Pass As A Canadian, I said that you had to start by finding one thing that you really, really liked about Canada. This is no different. Before you sit down to write a crossover fanfic, you absolutely, positively have to begin with one fandom that you really, really like and know really, really well. You can't get anywhere unless you have this as your starting point. Two fandoms you really like and know well would be preferable, but one is the absolute necessity so long as you at least respect the other and have access to related material. Fanfic is an act of appreciation for someone else's work, so find something that you really appreciate and want to write about yourself.
Once you've got your base fandom, stop for a moment and think. In my admittedly limited experience, crossovers come in two kinds: seamless and seams-showing. By 'seamless', I mean that the crossover is written in such a way that the two fictional universes are perfectly merged. In the context of the crossover, they've always been part of the same world; it's just that the characters from one fandom have never interacted with the people or places of the other fandom. 'Seams-showing' crossovers are where two universes interact in such a way that the contrasts are not only visible, but emphasized; the worlds of the two fandoms have never been together before, or if they have been together, the characters have had so little contact that they might as well have been separate universes.
I say this because it affects the tone of the story you plan to write. Seamless tends to go better with a serious tone; seams-showing style is comedy gold. My first seamless crossover (not counting Diary of a Mountie) was a story called Ichneumon, which crossed Starship Troopers with Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Hellblazer: Hogwarts and Evidence are both very obvious seams-showing crossovers. While Who Ya Gonna Owl? has the Ghostbusters co-existing with Harry Potter's universe, to the point where Egon went to Durmstrang as a kid, I consider it seams-showing because the emphasis is on how very different the two fandoms are. Ghostbusters is, after all, very much a comedy fandom, and contrast is a big part of comedy. This isn't to say that you can't get a serious tone from a story where you play up the contrasts between two or more fandoms- ask Alan Moore about the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen- but it's generally easier to get comedy out of contrast, I've found.
Regardless of whether you're going to go seamless or seams-showing, you need to know both your fandoms. I say 'both' because it's much easier if you start with only two fandoms on a crossover. Unless the blogosphere is a lot smaller than I thought, you're not Alan Moore, so you're best off not trying to merge multiple fandoms at one go. Start with two. And start by finding something that they have in common with each other, for Pete's sake! Yes, it's possible to cross M*A*S*H and Red Dwarf, or a novel of nineteenth century America and Le Morte D'Arthur, but it's hard. It works better if there's something in common, even if you're going for contrast. For instance:
Ichneumon: Both Starship Troopers and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon featured uniformed men serving their government, plus the use of very intelligent dogs. Go read Starship Troopers and keep an eye peeled for mention of neodogs, Calebs, or the K-9 Corps. Trust me, they're there.
Hellblazer: Hogwarts: Magic, obviously. And a British setting. And Big Scary Threatening Heaps of Evil. And adolescent boy wizards with dark hair and glasses and pet owls, although I only had Tim Hunter appear on the first page, really.
Who Ya Gonna Owl?: Magic, but more importantly, ghosts. Need I say more?
Evidence: This one's a bit different from the others. The only thing The Silmarillion and the Discworld books have in common is that they're both fantasy settings. However, The Silmarillion did feature someone very powerful and very bad who had to be hauled into daylight, chained up, tried and sentenced. Sam Vimes, in the Discworld novels, has often wished that he could do so to the figures of his world who're both very powerful and very naughty. It seemed a logical opportunity.
If you can put your finger on something your fandoms have in common, then you've got a good starting point for a crossover. Without that point of similarity, your only hope is to write a 'person from fandom X falls into fandom Y and the plot revolves around getting them back home' crossover. And that plot, while it can be done well, has long since been beaten to death. So find that common ground before you start.
Just don't count on mere commonality to carry your fic. What you need next is plot. It needs to be a reasonably decent plot, too; people these days hear 'crossover' and either dive under the table screaming (if they're fanfic readers) or think 'yawn yawn, Superman vs. the Alien, what happens on page two?'. Come up with a story idea that could function reasonably well in one or both of the fandoms, but that requires something unique to each fandom in order to function properly. I'd do examples from my own stuff, but I don't wanna come off as egotistical, so let me pull some other examples:
Freddy Vs. Jason: Killing, killing, killing! Lots of it, everywhere, all over the place! What a pity that Freddy's been locked out of the world; how can he get back? Why, by sending someone who's technically undead (Jason) to inspire people into remembering him again.
Collect Call of Cthulhu, by J. Michael Straczynski: Oh, dear, the Stars Are Right, and there's a cult in New York that wants to take advantage of the fact. Who has the knowledge and the ability to deal with the situation? Well, the Ghostbusters have most of the knowledge, but not all. Road trip! We're going to Miskatonic U!
The Punisher Meets Archie: No, I swear to God, this one's real. Meant as a joke by the guys who wrote it, but it's real. The Punisher's on the trail of a drug lord who flees New York City for a nice quiet town where he figures he can hide out and operate without being noticed- Riverdale. Such a pity that said drug lord looks like Archie Andrews, and that nobody in Riverdale has a stomach for the Punisher's brand of justice. But they're not into crime, either, so something has to be done before Archie gets killed.
Godzilla Vs. Cthulhu, by C. L. Werner: This is at http://www.fanfiction.net/read.php?storyid=209834, if you're interested. A fanatic cult is attempting to raise Cthulhu and R'leyh- again- and Japan's government knows there's no way to combat this directly. The only hope they have is to whistle up the most dangerous foe they've ever faced and turn him on the Elder God in the hopes that they'll destroy each other.
Looking at the above examples, you have in order: seamless, seamless, seams-showing, and seamless. Freddy Vs. Jason was meant seriously, or at least as seriously as any slasher film. Collect Call of Cthulhu was an episode of the Real Ghostbusters, and while it was meant as humor, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to have happen within the context of the Ghostbusters universe. Right down to consulting an occultist with more specialized knowledge. And Godzilla Vs. Cthulhu was, again, quite serious. True, it could have been played for comedy- kaiju are an easy target for that- but the writer was quite serious, and did an awfully good job if you ask me. The Punisher Meets Archie, on the other hand, was being played for laughs- even the writers looked on it as a joke. I haven't read it myself, so I can't vouch for the level of quality, but it was very definitely meant as a joke from start to finish rather than merely a humorous standard story.
One of the things all of these crossovers had in common was a level of attention to the original material. Freddy Vs. Jason had to reconcile the mythology of Freddy Krueger's history of dreamworld slaughter with Implacable Silent Killer Fu before it could get around to the bloodfest and the one-on-one fights between the title characters. Jason lost his first fight with Freddy because he was attempting to fight Krueger in the dream world, which has been established in canon as being a Very Bad Idea, but at Camp Crystal Lake he had the home-field advantage. The Ghostbusters had to deal with an Elder God- rather more than their proton packs could handle alone- and so went for authorities on the subject, based on what had been learned from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. Professor Derleth, of Miskatonic University, invoked the aid of Nodens for their final combat with the walking horror- Nodens being one of the tiny handful of beings in the Mythos who could be construed as being on humanity's side. (Trust me, she did. If you get hold of this episode, listen to what she's saying when they get to the big battle scene.) Godzilla Vs. Cthulhu used the typical sort of invention you'd find in a kaiju movie to get the atomic dragon up and moving, and adhered to the rules laid down about Cthulhu's rising- not to mention that Big Green couldn't be driven properly insane by the Elder God, 'cos all that was in his head to begin with was maddened rage.
You must do the same thing. Fanfiction is an act of respect and admiration towards the original canon material. Crossover fanfiction is the same thing, but requires more effort. You're trying to hybridize two separate fandoms; you have to get each one right, or else the end result is an ugly, useless, sterile mule of a fic. Actually, that's not fair. Mules are useful animals. Bad crossovers are no use to anyone at all.
If you are going to write a crossover, and you have decided on the fandoms you're going to use, and you know whether you want to merge things seamlessly or not, and you've found a point (or points) of similarity and come up with a plot, you now have to get your material in order. Keep your writing in line with what's been established, or people will point at you and laugh mockingly. John Constantine has blue eyes; you can't Apparate or Disapparate on the Hogwarts grounds; Sergeant Preston doesn't drink alcohol while on duty or in uniform; Hellboy cannot pick his nose with his right hand. This is why you desperately need your references close at hand; this is why I said to start with a fandom you like and know well. This may mean writing with your copy of $book open on your lap, or watching $movie while you take notes. You should probably do this anyway, just to make sure your base material is fresh in your mind. However, sometimes it's just a pain in the bum to look for what you want in the source material. That's when it helps to have other references on hand. Allow me to suggest a few that I've used myself.
The Harry Potter Lexicon: http://www.hp-lexicon.org/index-2.html
The Encyclopedia of Arda: http://www.glyphweb.com/arda. Good for The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion reference purposes.
Straight to Hell, a Hellblazer Site: http://www.insanerantings.com/hell/ This one was an absolute blessing. When I started writing Hellblazer: Hogwarts, I had never read an entire issue of Hellblazer, and had only a basic knowledge of the events of the Dangerous Habits story arc to go on. (Then again, I'm told by a big Hellblazer fan that to write Hellblazer, you only need to know two things really. One, the Dangerous Habits arc, and two, everyone who's ever called John Constantine a friend dies or suffers for it, usually horribly. At least, unless John has the sense to stay the hell out of their lives.)
The Real Ghostbusters Canon List: http://members.aol.com/Neotoma73/canon.htm
Ghostbusters Fanfic Writers' Resources: http://members.aol.com/Neotoma73/ficwrite.htm
There are other sources for these fandoms, of course, and there are obviously other fandoms with their own sources. These are just the ones I've used.
More in the next post.
dragonwhishes requested it...A Brief Guide to the Writing of Crossovers
In my guide to How To Pass As A Canadian, I said that you had to start by finding one thing that you really, really liked about Canada. This is no different. Before you sit down to write a crossover fanfic, you absolutely, positively have to begin with one fandom that you really, really like and know really, really well. You can't get anywhere unless you have this as your starting point. Two fandoms you really like and know well would be preferable, but one is the absolute necessity so long as you at least respect the other and have access to related material. Fanfic is an act of appreciation for someone else's work, so find something that you really appreciate and want to write about yourself.
Once you've got your base fandom, stop for a moment and think. In my admittedly limited experience, crossovers come in two kinds: seamless and seams-showing. By 'seamless', I mean that the crossover is written in such a way that the two fictional universes are perfectly merged. In the context of the crossover, they've always been part of the same world; it's just that the characters from one fandom have never interacted with the people or places of the other fandom. 'Seams-showing' crossovers are where two universes interact in such a way that the contrasts are not only visible, but emphasized; the worlds of the two fandoms have never been together before, or if they have been together, the characters have had so little contact that they might as well have been separate universes.
I say this because it affects the tone of the story you plan to write. Seamless tends to go better with a serious tone; seams-showing style is comedy gold. My first seamless crossover (not counting Diary of a Mountie) was a story called Ichneumon, which crossed Starship Troopers with Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Hellblazer: Hogwarts and Evidence are both very obvious seams-showing crossovers. While Who Ya Gonna Owl? has the Ghostbusters co-existing with Harry Potter's universe, to the point where Egon went to Durmstrang as a kid, I consider it seams-showing because the emphasis is on how very different the two fandoms are. Ghostbusters is, after all, very much a comedy fandom, and contrast is a big part of comedy. This isn't to say that you can't get a serious tone from a story where you play up the contrasts between two or more fandoms- ask Alan Moore about the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen- but it's generally easier to get comedy out of contrast, I've found.
Regardless of whether you're going to go seamless or seams-showing, you need to know both your fandoms. I say 'both' because it's much easier if you start with only two fandoms on a crossover. Unless the blogosphere is a lot smaller than I thought, you're not Alan Moore, so you're best off not trying to merge multiple fandoms at one go. Start with two. And start by finding something that they have in common with each other, for Pete's sake! Yes, it's possible to cross M*A*S*H and Red Dwarf, or a novel of nineteenth century America and Le Morte D'Arthur, but it's hard. It works better if there's something in common, even if you're going for contrast. For instance:
Ichneumon: Both Starship Troopers and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon featured uniformed men serving their government, plus the use of very intelligent dogs. Go read Starship Troopers and keep an eye peeled for mention of neodogs, Calebs, or the K-9 Corps. Trust me, they're there.
Hellblazer: Hogwarts: Magic, obviously. And a British setting. And Big Scary Threatening Heaps of Evil. And adolescent boy wizards with dark hair and glasses and pet owls, although I only had Tim Hunter appear on the first page, really.
Who Ya Gonna Owl?: Magic, but more importantly, ghosts. Need I say more?
Evidence: This one's a bit different from the others. The only thing The Silmarillion and the Discworld books have in common is that they're both fantasy settings. However, The Silmarillion did feature someone very powerful and very bad who had to be hauled into daylight, chained up, tried and sentenced. Sam Vimes, in the Discworld novels, has often wished that he could do so to the figures of his world who're both very powerful and very naughty. It seemed a logical opportunity.
If you can put your finger on something your fandoms have in common, then you've got a good starting point for a crossover. Without that point of similarity, your only hope is to write a 'person from fandom X falls into fandom Y and the plot revolves around getting them back home' crossover. And that plot, while it can be done well, has long since been beaten to death. So find that common ground before you start.
Just don't count on mere commonality to carry your fic. What you need next is plot. It needs to be a reasonably decent plot, too; people these days hear 'crossover' and either dive under the table screaming (if they're fanfic readers) or think 'yawn yawn, Superman vs. the Alien, what happens on page two?'. Come up with a story idea that could function reasonably well in one or both of the fandoms, but that requires something unique to each fandom in order to function properly. I'd do examples from my own stuff, but I don't wanna come off as egotistical, so let me pull some other examples:
Freddy Vs. Jason: Killing, killing, killing! Lots of it, everywhere, all over the place! What a pity that Freddy's been locked out of the world; how can he get back? Why, by sending someone who's technically undead (Jason) to inspire people into remembering him again.
Collect Call of Cthulhu, by J. Michael Straczynski: Oh, dear, the Stars Are Right, and there's a cult in New York that wants to take advantage of the fact. Who has the knowledge and the ability to deal with the situation? Well, the Ghostbusters have most of the knowledge, but not all. Road trip! We're going to Miskatonic U!
The Punisher Meets Archie: No, I swear to God, this one's real. Meant as a joke by the guys who wrote it, but it's real. The Punisher's on the trail of a drug lord who flees New York City for a nice quiet town where he figures he can hide out and operate without being noticed- Riverdale. Such a pity that said drug lord looks like Archie Andrews, and that nobody in Riverdale has a stomach for the Punisher's brand of justice. But they're not into crime, either, so something has to be done before Archie gets killed.
Godzilla Vs. Cthulhu, by C. L. Werner: This is at http://www.fanfiction.net/read.php?storyid=209834, if you're interested. A fanatic cult is attempting to raise Cthulhu and R'leyh- again- and Japan's government knows there's no way to combat this directly. The only hope they have is to whistle up the most dangerous foe they've ever faced and turn him on the Elder God in the hopes that they'll destroy each other.
Looking at the above examples, you have in order: seamless, seamless, seams-showing, and seamless. Freddy Vs. Jason was meant seriously, or at least as seriously as any slasher film. Collect Call of Cthulhu was an episode of the Real Ghostbusters, and while it was meant as humor, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to have happen within the context of the Ghostbusters universe. Right down to consulting an occultist with more specialized knowledge. And Godzilla Vs. Cthulhu was, again, quite serious. True, it could have been played for comedy- kaiju are an easy target for that- but the writer was quite serious, and did an awfully good job if you ask me. The Punisher Meets Archie, on the other hand, was being played for laughs- even the writers looked on it as a joke. I haven't read it myself, so I can't vouch for the level of quality, but it was very definitely meant as a joke from start to finish rather than merely a humorous standard story.
One of the things all of these crossovers had in common was a level of attention to the original material. Freddy Vs. Jason had to reconcile the mythology of Freddy Krueger's history of dreamworld slaughter with Implacable Silent Killer Fu before it could get around to the bloodfest and the one-on-one fights between the title characters. Jason lost his first fight with Freddy because he was attempting to fight Krueger in the dream world, which has been established in canon as being a Very Bad Idea, but at Camp Crystal Lake he had the home-field advantage. The Ghostbusters had to deal with an Elder God- rather more than their proton packs could handle alone- and so went for authorities on the subject, based on what had been learned from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. Professor Derleth, of Miskatonic University, invoked the aid of Nodens for their final combat with the walking horror- Nodens being one of the tiny handful of beings in the Mythos who could be construed as being on humanity's side. (Trust me, she did. If you get hold of this episode, listen to what she's saying when they get to the big battle scene.) Godzilla Vs. Cthulhu used the typical sort of invention you'd find in a kaiju movie to get the atomic dragon up and moving, and adhered to the rules laid down about Cthulhu's rising- not to mention that Big Green couldn't be driven properly insane by the Elder God, 'cos all that was in his head to begin with was maddened rage.
You must do the same thing. Fanfiction is an act of respect and admiration towards the original canon material. Crossover fanfiction is the same thing, but requires more effort. You're trying to hybridize two separate fandoms; you have to get each one right, or else the end result is an ugly, useless, sterile mule of a fic. Actually, that's not fair. Mules are useful animals. Bad crossovers are no use to anyone at all.
If you are going to write a crossover, and you have decided on the fandoms you're going to use, and you know whether you want to merge things seamlessly or not, and you've found a point (or points) of similarity and come up with a plot, you now have to get your material in order. Keep your writing in line with what's been established, or people will point at you and laugh mockingly. John Constantine has blue eyes; you can't Apparate or Disapparate on the Hogwarts grounds; Sergeant Preston doesn't drink alcohol while on duty or in uniform; Hellboy cannot pick his nose with his right hand. This is why you desperately need your references close at hand; this is why I said to start with a fandom you like and know well. This may mean writing with your copy of $book open on your lap, or watching $movie while you take notes. You should probably do this anyway, just to make sure your base material is fresh in your mind. However, sometimes it's just a pain in the bum to look for what you want in the source material. That's when it helps to have other references on hand. Allow me to suggest a few that I've used myself.
The Harry Potter Lexicon: http://www.hp-lexicon.org/index-2.html
The Encyclopedia of Arda: http://www.glyphweb.com/arda. Good for The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion reference purposes.
Straight to Hell, a Hellblazer Site: http://www.insanerantings.com/hell/ This one was an absolute blessing. When I started writing Hellblazer: Hogwarts, I had never read an entire issue of Hellblazer, and had only a basic knowledge of the events of the Dangerous Habits story arc to go on. (Then again, I'm told by a big Hellblazer fan that to write Hellblazer, you only need to know two things really. One, the Dangerous Habits arc, and two, everyone who's ever called John Constantine a friend dies or suffers for it, usually horribly. At least, unless John has the sense to stay the hell out of their lives.)
The Real Ghostbusters Canon List: http://members.aol.com/Neotoma73/canon.htm
Ghostbusters Fanfic Writers' Resources: http://members.aol.com/Neotoma73/ficwrite.htm
There are other sources for these fandoms, of course, and there are obviously other fandoms with their own sources. These are just the ones I've used.
More in the next post.