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Okay, dear Crossovering Author,
This is a behemoth of a letter and I sincerely apologise. I've tried to put down some thoughts and ideas, but apart from focus on the women and keep the dynamics of the teams pretty much the core thing is that you don't stress about this assignment. Work it out as you can, and I will be delighted that you write something for me!
THANK YOU!
things I like
- women at the centre of the narrative, fuelling the action, thinking, feeling, acting, having agency, or using what agency they have in the most effective way they have
- female friendships: women working together, respecting each other's skills, valuing each others' differences, even if they don't like each other
- respectful heterosexual relationships: men who respect women as people, who treat women as people, who love women as individuals; women who struggle to trust but still choose to trust, even as they find ways to be who they need to be. (I hold to the view that if we can't model such relationships in fiction, then we will never see them in real life.)
- I prefer fusions (characters from one universe fused into another as though they've always been in the second universe) to crossovers (characters from two universes encountering each other with the canon history from their universe)
- my thoughts on fusion AUs as a guide to help you if you're stuck about how to proceed
- worldbuilding with people in
do not wants
- slash, even background slash (I have specific slash preferences, it's easier just to say 'no slash' than to try to navigate the permissible)
- refrigerated/ignored female characters (even if one of the fandoms is guy-heavy, you can go light on the guys and just give me the female characters)
- deathfic, hopelessness, downer endings
--
A note on the fandoms; I'm listing my favourite character/OTP, then acceptable characters, then DNWs. If they're not on the list, please leave them out. Then I've listed the things I particularly enjoy about the universe, so you have a bead on what I might like.
Marvel Cinematic Universe
Fave character(s): Maria Hill
Pairing(s): Maria Hill/Steve Rogers
Also Acceptable: Maria Hill, Steve Rogers, Wanda Maximoff, Sif, Pepper Potts, Jane Foster, Sam Wilson, T'Challa, James Rhodes, Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes, Natasha Romanoff, Thor, Tony Stark, Vision.
DNW: villain Maria Hill, Loki, Darcy Lewis
What I like about canon: I have always had a thing for the superhero genre, even as a kid. People who are heroes, trying to do the right thing, who are often failing, or struggling with other things behind the heroism, or who question either their right to act or the rightness of acting. In particular, I love the characters who have to keep an eye on the consequences - who do the emotional labour of such interactions - frequently because they don't get a free pass. Maria Hill is precisely this character in the MCU - working for SHIELD, unnoticed, unrecognised - and yet capable of marshalling her resources to break Steve, Natasha, and Sam out from under HYDRA's nose. Capable of deep loyalty to Fury and the protection of the world, even as she works, respects, and relaxes with the Avengers.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: Heroes being heroes, even if they're not the Big Damn Ones. I really want to see Maria at the centre of this story, working with the Avengers team, living among them, accepted, befriended, beloved. Also Rhodey and Sam in this category, include Jane, Betty, Bucky, and T'Challa as you see fit!
Firefly
Fave character(s): Zoe Washburne
Pairing(s): Mal/Inara
Also Acceptable: any of the characters
DNW: Jayne-centric, Kaylee-centric (including them is fine, making the story about them is not)
What I like about canon: The worldbuilding that we saw - the layers of society, the aspects of interaction between those layers, both the nobility and the classy, and the down-and-dirty. The way Serenity's crew operates at the borders of those layers, even Inara, and makes it work for them. I would have liked more Asiatic influence and more Asian characters, with less exotification.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: I'd like the 'class distinctions' maintained - that is, one of the things I rather like about Firefly is how this disparate group of individuals are together in spite of all their differences. That is, whatever universe you write them into, it would be good to keep seeing the social gaps between them and how they bridge those.
Pacific Rim
Fave character(s): Mako Mori
Pairing(s): Mako Mori/Raleigh Becket, Stacker Pentecost/Hercules Hansen
Also Acceptable: Any of the female characters introduced in the extended canons (Alison Choi, Vanessa Gottlieb, Tamsin Sevier, Aleksis Kaidonovksi, So Yi, Yuna, Kaori, Ilsapie, Stefanie, Kennedy, etc.), most of the characters from the film - particularly the Wei brothers.
DNW: Chuck Hanson, Newt Geizsler.
What I like about canon: Giant robots fighting megamonsters? What's not to love? Um, yeah, like just about everyone else, I love the Jaeger program, but not just the pilot (although the pilots are great) but the support crews, the people who keep everything running (Tendo Choi). But I particularly like that a non-white woman got have the hero's narrative, achieving her dream in the movie, and wasn't treated as a sexy lamp along the way. Mako and Raleigh can be romantic or friendship, as long as that intimacy and affection between them is maintained.
Also: the sense of found family. Particularly centering around Mako as a representative microcosm of the world - the child who lost her family, found it again, but whose family also sacrificed themselves before she achieved her dreams.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: the same sense of hope and optimism; positive, heroic characters who are doing their best to reconnect in the middle of a world that's broken and shattered, but which isn't giving up on life, the universe, and everything.
Harry Potter
Fave character(s): Luna Lovegood
Pairing(s): Harry Potter/Luna Lovegood, Ron Weasley/Hermione Granger
Also Acceptable: Ginny Weasley, any of the Weasleys, pretty much any of Harry's allies along the way, Draco Malfoy but not more than a minor character
DNW: glorified Death Eaters or Death Eater mentalities
What I like about canon: HP is a world outside a world, a teeny tiny microcosm of fantasy in this otherwise fairly ordinary universe. And the wizarding world is hilarious and crazy - and perhaps just a little bit snobbish. I like Hogwarts School, yes, but also the broader wizarding world - particularly the aspects of the Ministry, the Aurors, and even just the everyday wizarding life.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: Luna is my favourite character, and I love her slightly skewed way of looking at the world. (I bet she invented Pokemon Go! People running around looking at 'imaginary' creatures that aren't? Oh yeah, Luna probably invented that.) I liked the way she saw through to the heart of the matter, even if her advice wasn't always practical. And I thought that she and Harry would have been cute - their shared understanding of what it meant to be a little bit different.
Stargate Atlantis
Fave character(s): Teyla Emmagan
Pairing(s): John Sheppard/Teyla Emmagan
Also Acceptable: Elizabeth Weir, Kate Heitmeyer, Ronon Dex, Radek Zelenka. Rodney should be used very sparingly; I like him, but not when the story is about him.
DNW: Monosyllabic 'primitive' Teyla; she's clever enough to have survived the Wraith, flexible enough to have adapted to the Atlantis expedition and the reconfiguration of her understanding of the universe, and intelligent enough to live in the expedition and be accepted pretty much as one of them, while still questioning some of the assumptions they make.
What I like about canon: The sense of exploration, of discovery - the idea that there are new world uncontacted, and what we might learn from them. Sadly, the show failed on the 'what we might learn from them' taking the traditional racist colonisation tropes and perpetrating them. However, I always felt that the Atlantis expedition could, would, and should be more - a true sense of open-minded discovery, the ability to accept that these people do not have technology but it's not that they're incapable of comprehending it, just that being in a constant endless war for one's life is not conducive to extended philosophy and technological development.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: Teyla as the odd-woman-out coming into a situation where she has to make her own way, and the other characters are willing to let her make her way among them, to accept her, and to come to see some of the things that she points out and how they work as real and valid views.
NCIS
Fave character(s): Ziva David
Pairing(s): Ziva David/Tony DiNozzo
Also Acceptable: any of the team pre S8
DNW: n/a
What I like about canon: The team, the way they worked together, the way they fell into their interactions easily enough. I particularly liked Ziva's distinct way of looking at things, how she earned Gibbs' respect, and how she pushed Tony's buttons.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: I'd like the same dynamics preserved - the team working together, but also being friends - however you work it out. If you can write the conflict of Ziva's family into the background narrative, that would be wonderful, but if not, then don't worry too much about it.
Merlin TV
Fave character(s): Gwen
Pairing(s): Gwen/Arthur
Also Acceptable: Pretty much anyone else.
DNW: n/a
What I like about canon: I only watched up to S3 of the series, largely because Gwen was my favourite character and she wasn't getting enough screen time, plus the continued knots that they twisted themselves into trying to keep Merlin's magic from Arthur? Noped me right out of there. So in this canon, I liked the original foursome - Gwen, Merlin, Morgana, Arthur - I liked the potential that we saw in all of them to be their end selves, and I guess I got kind of angry that it was never really achieved in canon.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: Try to keep the social dynamics. The complex layers of their relationships with each other was the thing that I enjoyed the most about the show - particularly in the early seasons. The dynamics of magic/non-magic, and nobility/commoner were multilayered, and one of the reasons that I liked Gwen best was that she was both non-magic and commoner, but was respected and liked and trusted by the other three in ways that they couldn't quite trust the others. Plus, she was just a genuinely lovely character. If you can keep that intersection of social dynamics when you cross them over, I would really adore that.
Battlestar Galactica
Fave character(s): Sharon "Athena" Agathon
Pairing(s): Sharon Agathon/Helo Agathon, Kara/Lee, Roslin/Adama
Also Acceptable: Anyone
DNW: Gaius Baltar - he annoys me
What I like about canon: This one's a bit different to the other fandoms. I love the other fandoms because they're heroes making heroic choices. This canon starts off with them making the unheroic choice - to leave millions of people behind because they can save some or they can save none. (I had a friend who HATED this BSG incarnation for that reason; however, at the time, I was sick of 'heroes always save everyone' and wanted something about characters who might have been heroic trying to scrape in survival. And then we got four seasons and increasingly depressing scenarios, and I was tired of that, too - so a little hard realism, but not too much.) I love the ships and the pilots, the way that the society has fallen, but some things hold - why do they hold? How? The rebuilding of society was fascinating because it very much subscribed to my perspective of humanity - with hope, but also with flaws, and there were times when hope prevailed and times when the flaws came out too strongly. And yet they made something of it, lived with the choices they'd made, and clung hard to life and living and love.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: My favourite characters were always the main cast from early on, chiefly the pilots and the BSG crew: Adama, Lee, Kara, Helo, Athena (I know Boomer got a rough deal, but I found it more difficult to like her), Cally, the Chief (early Chief, not later), Dee, Tigh... Roslin, Billy, Zarek (as an antagonist)... I didn't mind Six - Caprica Six more than angel-in-Gaius' head Six - and 'Downloaded' quite blew my mind away - the idea that the models were individuals within their models, like a template of something off the factory line, but then developing it's own quirks and such.
Stargate SG1
Fave character(s): Sam Carter
Pairing(s): Sam Carter/Jack O'Neill
Also Acceptable: Teal'c, Jonas, Jacob, Hammond, Daniel, Janet, Maybourne.
DNW: n/a
What I like about canon: Like Stargate Atlantis, the idea that there was a universe out there that we barely knew about, and had the chance to join in with. I think that SG1 achieved this better than Atlantis - the idea that Earth was weak technologically but that strength wasn't the only measure. The team hit me hard from the get-go, and I pretty much adored Sam from the moment she walked into the briefing room and put her ovaries on the table. Yes, even the sheer awks of that was still awesome.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: The same sense of friendship and connectedness, of working family and family to work at. I love Maybourne in the later seasons when he became a reluctant friend to the team, and snarked with Jack. And I always saw the dynamic between Sam and Jack as something that had potential, just not the space to flower until the end of the series.
Anyway, I hope that helps. If not, like I said at the start:
1. Ladies first.
2. Keep the dynamics.
3. Have fun!
4. THANK YOU!
This is a behemoth of a letter and I sincerely apologise. I've tried to put down some thoughts and ideas, but apart from focus on the women and keep the dynamics of the teams pretty much the core thing is that you don't stress about this assignment. Work it out as you can, and I will be delighted that you write something for me!
THANK YOU!
things I like
- women at the centre of the narrative, fuelling the action, thinking, feeling, acting, having agency, or using what agency they have in the most effective way they have
- female friendships: women working together, respecting each other's skills, valuing each others' differences, even if they don't like each other
- respectful heterosexual relationships: men who respect women as people, who treat women as people, who love women as individuals; women who struggle to trust but still choose to trust, even as they find ways to be who they need to be. (I hold to the view that if we can't model such relationships in fiction, then we will never see them in real life.)
- I prefer fusions (characters from one universe fused into another as though they've always been in the second universe) to crossovers (characters from two universes encountering each other with the canon history from their universe)
- my thoughts on fusion AUs as a guide to help you if you're stuck about how to proceed
- worldbuilding with people in
do not wants
- slash, even background slash (I have specific slash preferences, it's easier just to say 'no slash' than to try to navigate the permissible)
- refrigerated/ignored female characters (even if one of the fandoms is guy-heavy, you can go light on the guys and just give me the female characters)
- deathfic, hopelessness, downer endings
--
A note on the fandoms; I'm listing my favourite character/OTP, then acceptable characters, then DNWs. If they're not on the list, please leave them out. Then I've listed the things I particularly enjoy about the universe, so you have a bead on what I might like.
Marvel Cinematic Universe
Fave character(s): Maria Hill
Pairing(s): Maria Hill/Steve Rogers
Also Acceptable: Maria Hill, Steve Rogers, Wanda Maximoff, Sif, Pepper Potts, Jane Foster, Sam Wilson, T'Challa, James Rhodes, Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes, Natasha Romanoff, Thor, Tony Stark, Vision.
DNW: villain Maria Hill, Loki, Darcy Lewis
What I like about canon: I have always had a thing for the superhero genre, even as a kid. People who are heroes, trying to do the right thing, who are often failing, or struggling with other things behind the heroism, or who question either their right to act or the rightness of acting. In particular, I love the characters who have to keep an eye on the consequences - who do the emotional labour of such interactions - frequently because they don't get a free pass. Maria Hill is precisely this character in the MCU - working for SHIELD, unnoticed, unrecognised - and yet capable of marshalling her resources to break Steve, Natasha, and Sam out from under HYDRA's nose. Capable of deep loyalty to Fury and the protection of the world, even as she works, respects, and relaxes with the Avengers.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: Heroes being heroes, even if they're not the Big Damn Ones. I really want to see Maria at the centre of this story, working with the Avengers team, living among them, accepted, befriended, beloved. Also Rhodey and Sam in this category, include Jane, Betty, Bucky, and T'Challa as you see fit!
Firefly
Fave character(s): Zoe Washburne
Pairing(s): Mal/Inara
Also Acceptable: any of the characters
DNW: Jayne-centric, Kaylee-centric (including them is fine, making the story about them is not)
What I like about canon: The worldbuilding that we saw - the layers of society, the aspects of interaction between those layers, both the nobility and the classy, and the down-and-dirty. The way Serenity's crew operates at the borders of those layers, even Inara, and makes it work for them. I would have liked more Asiatic influence and more Asian characters, with less exotification.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: I'd like the 'class distinctions' maintained - that is, one of the things I rather like about Firefly is how this disparate group of individuals are together in spite of all their differences. That is, whatever universe you write them into, it would be good to keep seeing the social gaps between them and how they bridge those.
Pacific Rim
Fave character(s): Mako Mori
Pairing(s): Mako Mori/Raleigh Becket, Stacker Pentecost/Hercules Hansen
Also Acceptable: Any of the female characters introduced in the extended canons (Alison Choi, Vanessa Gottlieb, Tamsin Sevier, Aleksis Kaidonovksi, So Yi, Yuna, Kaori, Ilsapie, Stefanie, Kennedy, etc.), most of the characters from the film - particularly the Wei brothers.
DNW: Chuck Hanson, Newt Geizsler.
What I like about canon: Giant robots fighting megamonsters? What's not to love? Um, yeah, like just about everyone else, I love the Jaeger program, but not just the pilot (although the pilots are great) but the support crews, the people who keep everything running (Tendo Choi). But I particularly like that a non-white woman got have the hero's narrative, achieving her dream in the movie, and wasn't treated as a sexy lamp along the way. Mako and Raleigh can be romantic or friendship, as long as that intimacy and affection between them is maintained.
Also: the sense of found family. Particularly centering around Mako as a representative microcosm of the world - the child who lost her family, found it again, but whose family also sacrificed themselves before she achieved her dreams.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: the same sense of hope and optimism; positive, heroic characters who are doing their best to reconnect in the middle of a world that's broken and shattered, but which isn't giving up on life, the universe, and everything.
Harry Potter
Fave character(s): Luna Lovegood
Pairing(s): Harry Potter/Luna Lovegood, Ron Weasley/Hermione Granger
Also Acceptable: Ginny Weasley, any of the Weasleys, pretty much any of Harry's allies along the way, Draco Malfoy but not more than a minor character
DNW: glorified Death Eaters or Death Eater mentalities
What I like about canon: HP is a world outside a world, a teeny tiny microcosm of fantasy in this otherwise fairly ordinary universe. And the wizarding world is hilarious and crazy - and perhaps just a little bit snobbish. I like Hogwarts School, yes, but also the broader wizarding world - particularly the aspects of the Ministry, the Aurors, and even just the everyday wizarding life.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: Luna is my favourite character, and I love her slightly skewed way of looking at the world. (I bet she invented Pokemon Go! People running around looking at 'imaginary' creatures that aren't? Oh yeah, Luna probably invented that.) I liked the way she saw through to the heart of the matter, even if her advice wasn't always practical. And I thought that she and Harry would have been cute - their shared understanding of what it meant to be a little bit different.
Stargate Atlantis
Fave character(s): Teyla Emmagan
Pairing(s): John Sheppard/Teyla Emmagan
Also Acceptable: Elizabeth Weir, Kate Heitmeyer, Ronon Dex, Radek Zelenka. Rodney should be used very sparingly; I like him, but not when the story is about him.
DNW: Monosyllabic 'primitive' Teyla; she's clever enough to have survived the Wraith, flexible enough to have adapted to the Atlantis expedition and the reconfiguration of her understanding of the universe, and intelligent enough to live in the expedition and be accepted pretty much as one of them, while still questioning some of the assumptions they make.
What I like about canon: The sense of exploration, of discovery - the idea that there are new world uncontacted, and what we might learn from them. Sadly, the show failed on the 'what we might learn from them' taking the traditional racist colonisation tropes and perpetrating them. However, I always felt that the Atlantis expedition could, would, and should be more - a true sense of open-minded discovery, the ability to accept that these people do not have technology but it's not that they're incapable of comprehending it, just that being in a constant endless war for one's life is not conducive to extended philosophy and technological development.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: Teyla as the odd-woman-out coming into a situation where she has to make her own way, and the other characters are willing to let her make her way among them, to accept her, and to come to see some of the things that she points out and how they work as real and valid views.
NCIS
Fave character(s): Ziva David
Pairing(s): Ziva David/Tony DiNozzo
Also Acceptable: any of the team pre S8
DNW: n/a
What I like about canon: The team, the way they worked together, the way they fell into their interactions easily enough. I particularly liked Ziva's distinct way of looking at things, how she earned Gibbs' respect, and how she pushed Tony's buttons.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: I'd like the same dynamics preserved - the team working together, but also being friends - however you work it out. If you can write the conflict of Ziva's family into the background narrative, that would be wonderful, but if not, then don't worry too much about it.
Merlin TV
Fave character(s): Gwen
Pairing(s): Gwen/Arthur
Also Acceptable: Pretty much anyone else.
DNW: n/a
What I like about canon: I only watched up to S3 of the series, largely because Gwen was my favourite character and she wasn't getting enough screen time, plus the continued knots that they twisted themselves into trying to keep Merlin's magic from Arthur? Noped me right out of there. So in this canon, I liked the original foursome - Gwen, Merlin, Morgana, Arthur - I liked the potential that we saw in all of them to be their end selves, and I guess I got kind of angry that it was never really achieved in canon.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: Try to keep the social dynamics. The complex layers of their relationships with each other was the thing that I enjoyed the most about the show - particularly in the early seasons. The dynamics of magic/non-magic, and nobility/commoner were multilayered, and one of the reasons that I liked Gwen best was that she was both non-magic and commoner, but was respected and liked and trusted by the other three in ways that they couldn't quite trust the others. Plus, she was just a genuinely lovely character. If you can keep that intersection of social dynamics when you cross them over, I would really adore that.
Battlestar Galactica
Fave character(s): Sharon "Athena" Agathon
Pairing(s): Sharon Agathon/Helo Agathon, Kara/Lee, Roslin/Adama
Also Acceptable: Anyone
DNW: Gaius Baltar - he annoys me
What I like about canon: This one's a bit different to the other fandoms. I love the other fandoms because they're heroes making heroic choices. This canon starts off with them making the unheroic choice - to leave millions of people behind because they can save some or they can save none. (I had a friend who HATED this BSG incarnation for that reason; however, at the time, I was sick of 'heroes always save everyone' and wanted something about characters who might have been heroic trying to scrape in survival. And then we got four seasons and increasingly depressing scenarios, and I was tired of that, too - so a little hard realism, but not too much.) I love the ships and the pilots, the way that the society has fallen, but some things hold - why do they hold? How? The rebuilding of society was fascinating because it very much subscribed to my perspective of humanity - with hope, but also with flaws, and there were times when hope prevailed and times when the flaws came out too strongly. And yet they made something of it, lived with the choices they'd made, and clung hard to life and living and love.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: My favourite characters were always the main cast from early on, chiefly the pilots and the BSG crew: Adama, Lee, Kara, Helo, Athena (I know Boomer got a rough deal, but I found it more difficult to like her), Cally, the Chief (early Chief, not later), Dee, Tigh... Roslin, Billy, Zarek (as an antagonist)... I didn't mind Six - Caprica Six more than angel-in-Gaius' head Six - and 'Downloaded' quite blew my mind away - the idea that the models were individuals within their models, like a template of something off the factory line, but then developing it's own quirks and such.
Stargate SG1
Fave character(s): Sam Carter
Pairing(s): Sam Carter/Jack O'Neill
Also Acceptable: Teal'c, Jonas, Jacob, Hammond, Daniel, Janet, Maybourne.
DNW: n/a
What I like about canon: Like Stargate Atlantis, the idea that there was a universe out there that we barely knew about, and had the chance to join in with. I think that SG1 achieved this better than Atlantis - the idea that Earth was weak technologically but that strength wasn't the only measure. The team hit me hard from the get-go, and I pretty much adored Sam from the moment she walked into the briefing room and put her ovaries on the table. Yes, even the sheer awks of that was still awesome.
What I would like in a crossover with these characters: The same sense of friendship and connectedness, of working family and family to work at. I love Maybourne in the later seasons when he became a reluctant friend to the team, and snarked with Jack. And I always saw the dynamic between Sam and Jack as something that had potential, just not the space to flower until the end of the series.
Anyway, I hope that helps. If not, like I said at the start:
1. Ladies first.
2. Keep the dynamics.
3. Have fun!
4. THANK YOU!
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