On Crossovers and Yummy Crackfic

Originally written in my Livejournal, May 30, 2008

Personally, I blame Scooby-Doo. Like every good child of the 1970s and 80s, I watched The Adventures of Scooby-Doo every Saturday morning. Usually the gang was out for a fun, spooky, groovy time, solving a mystery that involved some extremely unlikely supernatural monster that just happened to be keeping people away from an area full of treasure. But sometimes, occasionally, other people would show up: Don Knotts, Sonny and Cher, the Harlem Globe Trotters, or my personal favorite, Batman and Robin. Yes, Scooby-Doo is my very first experience with crossovers. Somehow, I think the wackiness of that show perfectly fits with what crossovers can sometimes be.

There’s a lot of debate in fandom about crossovers, and almost everyone seems to have an opinion about whether they are a legitimate form of ficcing or a complete cop-out that ignores the boundries of previously created worlds. I’d argue that both are actually correct. Sometimes a crossover makes complete sense, but at other times it’s complete crackfic. It’s my opinion that there’s nothing wrong with a little good fictional crack on occasion. However, for a crossover fic to really work, some things do need to be taken into account.

First off, it helps if one or both of the two fandoms could really collide with the other within their own canons. For example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: The Series are technically part of the same canon, although they do seem to veer off from one another in some ways. For example, when Los Angeles experiences a rain of fire and days of complete darkness, no one in Sunnydale mentions it. Canonically, many of the characters on AtS started on BtVS, and several of them even travelled back and forth in guest spots between the shows (most notably Buffy, Angel, Spike, Oz, and Faith). On the other hand, plenty of characters from Buffy have no knowledge at all of characters on Angel: Joyce never knew anything about Lilah, for example, and Gunn has never to our knowledge met Xander.

This kind of “close cousins” crossover is usually the easiest one to pull off because it’s really only a question of getting the characters into the same locality. The writer doesn’t need to worry overmuch about things like time period differences, different social systems, changes in technology, or physical abilities in the same way that a crossover between, say, Buffy and Star Trek would need to do if Mr. Spock suddenly showed up at Sunnydale High. If the two canons are virtually identical or mesh well together, the fic doesn’t need to do a lot of explaining but instead can simply look for canon opportunities when two or more characters could have met up. The time that elapses during summer hiatuses is usually a prime opportunity for this kind of crossover.

However, most crossovers aren’t so closely related. In fact, very few really fall into the category of same-canon crossovers. Buffy, Angel, and Fray; the Star Wars original trilogy and its prequels; Cheers and Frasier; and the various incarnations of Star Trek belong at this level, as well, I’m sure, as a few others, but many people wouldn’t even consider fics that combine these fandoms to be crossovers since they share canon to begin with. What about the other, more challenging kinds of crossovers, the ones where the creators of canon A had absolutely nothing to do with the creators of canon B? Some are going to be easier to juggle than others, but there are some issues you need to look at when dealing with more extreme forms of crossovers.

Is it possible for the two canons to exist at the same time? If the answer is a resounding “no,” then probably your only option is going to be a crackfic. You might be surprised, though, to see how often two canons can actually overlap. For example, take Buffy and Lost. At first glance, these two shows really don’t have much in common: they take place in different locations, the Lost island does not appear to have vampires, Buffy has no logical reason for running into an island in the Pacific (or wherever it might be), the Lost cast is generally trapped on the island, etc. It looks rather hopeless as far as crossover possibilities are concerned. That said, try looking at it from a slightly different perspective. Rather than where can’t there be an overlap, where could there be? Suddenly, there are similiarities that could be exploited. The paranormal studies of the Hanso Foundation sound a bit like the work of the Initiative. There’s no reason why Angel couldn’t have run into Hurley or Jack while out helping the hopeless in L.A. or Charlie couldn’t have walked past Wesley at the Watcher’s Academy in London. Could the smoke monster be something a Slayer might have to battle? Suffice to say, the supernatural occurs in both canons, and there are places where characters could be geographically connected. Once that comes together, many of the other problems can be overcome relatively easily.

Sometimes getting two canons together will take a great deal of imagination. This is where some of the traits in a show like AtS or BtVS can be very useful. For example, let’s say you want to crossover a character from the Buffyverse with Firefly, which takes place hundreds of years in the future. There are many options for this. As some of the characters are vampires and can live for centuries without aging, any of the still-existing vamps could be alive by the time Firefly is happening: Angel, Spike, Drusilla, and Harmony are all options, as would any other character who happened to become a vampire. Other demons could also work. We have no idea what kind of life expectancy a character like Lorne or D’Hoffryn or Clem might have, so they do have the possiblitiy of surviving that far into the future. Another option is the possibility that a spell cast could make a character’s life unnaturally long. We’ve seen some examples of apparently human characters living very long lives, such as Drogyn or the Guardian. Finally, although direct time travel is never completely accomplished in the Buffyverse (but Holtz’s centuries-long nap could qualify), there are loads of portals and magical objects that are canonical. It’s possible to say that Willow or the Watcher’s Council might have the power to time travel with the right spells, or some esoteric object might be able to transcend time or realities. Again, different works will have different amounts of canon available to them for things like this. Something like Harry Potter could work in a similar way (some wizards live extremely long lives, we don’t know how long house-elves or goblins or centaurs might live, spells for time travel exist to some extent in the form of pensieve memories and time turners, etc.), but a fandom such as Friends or most soap operas would not be able to use this kind of device without some serious canon-bending.

At other times, getting two canons together isn’t simply a matter of time and place but a matter of realities butting heads. For example, try crossing over Harry Potter with Buffy. One of the major problems here is that there have been references to the Harry Potter books as fictional works inside the canon of Buffy. Dawn mentions Hogwarts, for example, while Spike references Wesley as “Percy” when he finds out he was once head boy at his England boarding school, which may or may not be a reference to Percy Weasley. In this case, one canon has already stipulated the other canon does not exist outside of fiction in its reality. That’s a real problem to get around, but it can be done.

The most obvious way to fix the “fictional-within-fictional” issue to show that canon A was mistaken about canon B not existing. In the Buffyverse, this is particularly possible since canonically much of the world is oblivious to monsters and vampires, considering them to be merely fictional, and yet that concept is incorrect. Getting a canonically fictional world like Harry Potter’s into Buffy’s might be as simple as Giles admitting that, yes, Hogwarts exists or that there have been some Wizarding activities subject to scrutiny by the Council over the years but an accord of secrecy was reached about them, etc.

Another way is to have canon A realize canon B is actually a parallel universe. In the Buffyverse, there are scads of parallel universes (or alternate universes or alternate realites, whatever term you choose): the Wishverse, the Birthdayverse, the Asylumverse, etc. In addition, we know there are alternate dimensions in the Buffyverse, such as the heavenly dimension Buffy was in after death, the hell dimension Angel was trapped in, and even the aptly titled World without Shrimp (or the World of Nothing But Shrimp, if you're not allergic). The concept of a place like Hogwarts being an alternate dimension could work, possibly even suggesting that someone went there, came back, and wrote a book about it in Buffy’s dimension, allowing it to be both canonically a fictional book and canonically an alternate dimension simultaneously. Again, that’s going to be a lot eaiser to pull off with more fantasy-based works like Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Narnia as opposed to something like Gone with the Wind. If Scarlet O’Hara just pops up one day at The Bronze, the writer is going to have a lot of explaining to do.

The last one is the truly difficult type of crossover to pull off: the “These Two Canons Are Completely Different and Have No Connection Whatsoever” crossover, aka, “How Did I Get Myself into this Mess?” At this point, you are probably dealing with crackfic. Extreme examples would be sticking Buffy into Hamlet, putting Spike in the middle of "Cinderella," or having Cordelia suddenly playing the lead in West Side Story. Most of the time this is being done for comic effect. What’s interesting about comedy is that provided the interactions or characterizations are reasonably okay, readers are usually willing to have a much larger suspension of disbelief with comedy than in general fiction. Take, for example, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The knights clap coconuts together to simulate horses, a group of mistrels is eaten (and there was much rejoicing), and let’s not even get into the bizarro ending of the movie. It’s a comedy! If you are sitting in the audience and saying, “Yes, but coconuts were not available in Britain during the era of Arthur,” or “But the crux of the Grail legend is dealing with the concept of impurity seeping into Arthur’s court via Lancelot’s adulterous relationship with Guinevere and Arthur’s incestuous son and nephew Mordred, yet neither Guinevere nor Mordred appear in the film, undermining its canonical basis,” you are missing the point entirely and deeply need to lighten up.

The key with good crackfic is to take it both seriously and not seriously at the same time. As with any crossover, you need to know your canon. If you really are going to put Buffy in Elsinore Castle in the middle of Hamlet’s tragedy, you’d better know both Hamlet and Buffy very well. You can’t effectively poke fun at things unless you know the things themselves. At the same time, while you need to know your canon, you also need to know how to expose some of the idiocy that lies in almost all canon if you look at it long enough. For example, in Hamlet the title character pretty much sits around and does squat other than pretending to be nuts for an inordinate length of time while trying to figure out what to do. When he finally does decide his uncle needs to die, he makes him drink poison, then stabs him, and on top of that the blade is poisoned. Personally I love the Brannagh version because for good measure he’s also run through with a chandelier. If you think about that from the right twisted way, the quite literal “overkill” is funny. Buffy herself would be sure to comment on Hamlet’s highly original method of slaying, perhaps suggesting that he should stake and/or behead his uncle too, just in case. The Buffyverse itself in many ways was able to see the absurdity of its own world, complete with citizens who somehow think an outburst of singing and dancing can somehow be chalked up to complete normalcy and that a whole lot of people in town apparently die by tripping on barbeque forks, so having one of its characters comment on the absurdity in another canon actually makes sense. In general, the rule with crackfic is to figure out what’s funny and run with it. And by run, I don’t mean jog lightly. I mean run like you just realized you were standing naked in front of your high school geometry class and your clothes are two floors down. It’s the extremity of the situation that makes it or breaks it. Go big.

Crossovers can go awry, of course, as can any kind of fic. The real keys are to have an understanding of both canons, a decent plot that uses the two canons together to tell an interesting story, and a plausible explanation for why the two canons have collided. Generally, except in rare circumstances, I think it’s best not to juggle more than two canons unless you’re going for massive crackfic because it gets confusing. That is perhaps where many crossovers do go wrong: confusing the reader, or sometimes even the writer, with too much complexity. Keeping it simple is often the best way to go when dealing with more than one canon.

What it all comes down to is this. Not everyone likes crossover fic, but then not everyone likes any kind of fic. If the idea is creeping around in the back of your head and you really think it would be unspeakably great if one character from fandom A met up with one or more characters from fandom B, and you can figure out how to do it? Go, baby, go! Fanfiction is, when all is said and done, a game. We are playing in the same way kids in a sandbox do; we make up the rules as we go along, and we know we’ve messed up if the game stops being fun. Have some fun. Write a crossover. Remember there is no sin in writing good crackfic. So, the next time you think, “Hey, you know, the Buffyverse and Scooby-Doo could possibly hang out together,” you’re probably right. Batman agrees, after all.