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

Crossovers, the union of two or more media sources in a single cohesive narrative.

I've always been drawn to the idea of characters from a show to be thrown into a setting of a different world or meeting with characters from a different show altogether. The situations that develop from those scenarios are certainly some of the most entertaining episodes I can remember.

From that episode of the Spiderman 90's cartoon where he meets with the X-Men from the same animation era, to Star Maniacs (Animaniacs starring in Star Wars). From Marvel VS Capcon to Super Smash Bros. X-overs open up many possibilities for some amazing stories...

... But sometimes, poor execution can turn a X-over idea into a flawed story. Or no ammount of flawless exectution can justify a poor X-over concept.

This seems to be a really huge problem when it comes to Fanfiction writing, where more often than not, X-overs end up being lazy, uninspired, nonsensical or just downright disrespectful to your source materials. Even satirical works tend to have little to no effort put to them. Authors that don't know how to combine the sources or don't fully understand the two of them keep making the same mistakes without learning how to fix them.

So, I want to start up discussion of what it takes to build a good X-over narrative. We can discuss settings, ideas, mistakes that should be avoided, X-over fics that you think work and others that just don't, etc.

One can can even pitch in crossover ideas that one'd like to write or like to see made, and everybody could help in developing the idea, along with the main discussion. 