I have a soft spot for crossover stories. Of course, a lot of this is because of the fan fiction series that I loved writing even if I cringe to actually read it, but the appeal goes farther than that. It even goes farther than the general concept of throwing beloved characters from a generally bright and sunshiny series into various death traps and other trauma.
Really, all writing is crossover writing. I don't mean we're all really fan fiction writers (although an argument could probably be made for that), but we're too far along in time for any work to be wholly its own thing. Brutal is a crossover between Hetalia and The Hunger Games; The Long and Winding Road is a crossover between Hetalia and the zombie apocalypse; the story of Max in prison is a crossover between Macbay Transportation Services and a writing prompt; Portalmancy is a crossover between the ideas of a more literal photogate and the power to telepathically switch door hinges.
Whether it be an entire pre-made universe (such as the real world, if not a published story), a system of magic, a character trait, or or a time period, everything in a story is from somewhere else. The only real creation is crossing things over, finding a complex combination that hasn't quite been laid out in words (or pictures, or maybe notes) before.
That's my take on it, at least. What do you think?
This thought is why I chose the pen name Amanda Mim. Mim is short for Mimic. I see all my stories as, at some level, mimicry of others and things. Most of my favorite "O"Cs are someone else's character, after X,Y,Z happened to them. My favorite setting is Minecraft meets the zombie apocalypse plus spirits. Even the elemental story I've been talking ̶a̶t̶ with you about, is Xiaolin Showdown's characters, with a fanfiction's interpretation of their personalities onto a world mimicking ours.
ReplyDeleteMim
Ah, I didn't know that! I like it.
DeleteAs in, a setting you in which you like to write stories? Interesting. (I don't know all that much about MineCraft still...)
I suppose so. I hadn't really been comparing any of it yet, but that makes sense.
The setting is the land of The City Of Discard (Working title used to be Floating Worlds because of Minecraft's gravity defying blocks). It has some areas inspired by Minecraft terrain and structures.
DeleteMim
I like this idea. It makes a lot of sense because, really, each character and plot is just a variation of another. I tend to get irritated when people bash a show or book simply because "it's been done before" (i.e. Hunger Games being called a ripoff of Battle Royale by people who haven't even bothered to read the books) because *everything's* been done before; it just comes down to how one puts their own little twist on it, and what other things they cross it over with.
ReplyDeleteAlso, speaking of the argument that everyone's technically a FanFiction writer, I've realized for a while that Shakespeare essentially wrote FanFics and real person fics. Just think about it! Most of his plays were based off of previously-written poems, legends or other plays, or they were the (heavily romanticized) stories of people who had actually lived.
There was one book that referred to everything as a bucket of eels, and stories came from pulling different ones out of the bucket. It's not quite as glamorous a description.
DeleteYeah, I read Battle Royale (mostly because of the comparisons, but because I thought that meant I would like it), and it's really quite different. Especially when Suzanne Collins said her initial inspiration was from something completely different (I can't recall exactly what at the moment). On the other hand, my Hunger Games-ish thing was indeed inspired by the Hunger Games, so it needs a few more handfuls of eels before it's not an honest rip-off.
Yeah! We actually read the actual Othello account alongside the play, so it was interesting to compare.