Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-25405817-20160511154306/@comment-25405817-20160516024747

Well, to try and continue the discussion of Crossover making, allow me to explain one type of x-over that sort of guarantees that your story will remain mostly original; I call it "hybrid x-over"  (I ignore if it has a better name).

This type of x-over is tricky in the sense that it doesn't have a concrete formula to create your setting (no "X meets Y," etc). To build up the setting first you need to break down the elements of your two sources and compare them to each other. This part also helps you gain a better understanding of the sources you're using.

When comparing the basic elements of your materials, you then start picking which elements from which material you're carrying into the x-over, or in a few cases, which elements you can combine together without altering their concept. This process varies depending of the source materials you pick, and it doesn't works for all possible combinations, as it happens with all x-over types.

After you've done selecting the elements and builded up the overall setting, you can start brainstorming the main plot.

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Take my Fic for example: Persona: SH . It is a x-over between RWBY and the Persona series (the later installments), with the main cast of RWBY in a setting similar to that of the Persona games, on a majorly original story-arc (I do take some cues from here and there). During the building process, I found two crucial sets of elements that entered in conflict with each other: the powers and the monsters.

Like you are aware, people in Remnant have an Aura that protects people from harm and that can evolve into a more active skill known as Semblance. In the Persona games, however, a few people have a power that is different than Aura/Semblance, which is the power of Persona: The ability to summon "a facade to protect you against life's hardships," which takes on the form of different entities from ancient mythology, history or literature. In my story, I couldn't keep both Aura/Semblance and Persona, and since I have my objective clear, I decided to drop Aura/Semblance from my setting.

The second element was the monsters. In Remnant, Grimm are creatures of darkness bent onto destroying humanity, and are atracted to negative emotions from humans. in the Persona games (the latest, current installments), people with Personas fight against "Shadows," which are the negative emotions of humans. It is also worth mentioning that while Grimm exist in the same plane as Humans and Faunus, Shadows exist in a different world. Since having the two of them at the same time just complicate things, I decided to drop the Grimm from my setting... at least their canonical version.

From that on, the rest of the process became more intuitive. Other than characters and locations, my setting was required to make Remnant be as similar to the real world as possible. At least as real as the World in Persona. That meant that I had to pretty much nerf Remnant down, including the aforementioned elements, the existense of Faunus and the technologic advancements that allowed for mix-n-match weapons.

To be completely honest, I think this setting works. I feel confident about it after going through the process of disecting and assembling the elements I needed.