Fan Fiction Crossovers

One of my goals for 2011 was to finish all three of the fanfiction crossovers that were Works In Progress on January 1st. It’s looking like I might actually accomplish that goal! I’ve got one that’s still incomplete, but the plot is clearly winding up, (and leaving open the possibility of a sequel.)

To me, writing a crossover can be the ultimate fanfic high – not just playing with somebody else’s characters and telling your own story with them, but trying to find a way to make two different fandoms work together for more than twice the fun, and finding the common ground between them.

The first crossover I finished this year was ‘A Roswellian Alien in Metropolis’, and it was already nearly finished in December – 3 chapters out of four. This was a sequel to a Roswell/Smallville crossover that I wrote because of a challenge. The first story in the series, ‘Arrow through my soul’, involved Maria DeLuca going to Metropolis for a record deal and falling in love with Oliver Queen/Green Arrow.

By the time I finished that one, I’d already thought that there could be a sequel involving Michael going to Metropolis as well, and then I got the idea of Chloe trying to train Michael to become part of the Justice League. That gave me my opening scene, but it was actually when Chloe sent Lana Lang to keep tabs on Michael that the story really hit high gear. Somehow Michael and Lana have chemistry on the page. Who knew?

And that’s part of the fun of crossovers, of course, seeing how the different characters will relate to each other. Roswell and Smallville have very similar canons and mythologies, of course – both teen soaps originally from the WB network, featuring extraterrestrial teenagers hiding their abilities. It wasn’t hard to picture the two sets of characters, some in New Mexico and the others in Kansas, unaware of what was going on in the next state over.

Both of these stories have followed the pattern of a protagonist character from Roswell (in first person narration,) entering the world of Smallville and meeting many of that show’s characters, and facing a challenge from a Smallville antagonist. I’m still considering a third story in the series, which would play with that convention a little, and have Clark come to Roswell and meet with Max, Liz, Michael and some of the others.

Switching POV and voice.

I started a new fanfic crossover piece in late June, and started working on Chapter Two early in August, after JulNoWriMo was over. This story, ‘A New Mexican Alien in Metropolis,’ is Smallville/Roswell fandoms, and a sequel to a charity auction challenge story that I did last fall, ‘Arrow through my soul.’

For a while, the new story was going great – Michael Guerin had come to Metropolis to start a fight with Oliver Queen, but Oliver wasn’t available, so I was introducing him to Chloe Sullivan, (who he kind of grudgingly tolerated,) Davis Bloom, (who he almost got in a fist-fight with, and then bonded over the graveyard shift life with,) and last of all Lana Lang, and sparks definitely started to fly between Michael and Lana, with much flirting and witty banter going on without my feeling like I had to work at it at all…

Until the dinner at the Italian restaurant started to bog down in sharing of canon trivia between their two universes, so desperately I tried to shift ahead suddenly to a scene with the two of them breaking into Maria’s Metropolis apartment… and that scene absolutely stalled. Sigh.

I switched to another project for a few days, and yesterday it occurred to me that maybe one of the problems with ‘Metropolis’ was that I was writing it in third person, generally following Michael’s perceptions. ‘Arrow’ had been first person POV, with Maria narrating as she travelled into the worlds of Metropolis and Smallville, Kansas, and I think that worked well. So today on the bus I started going through what I’d written for ‘Metropolis’ and changing “Michael” and “he” to “I”, “they” to “us”, and all other pronouns as necessary to make it first person.

In the process, I noticed some interesting things happening, that other changes in wording and phrasing were coming up, because the words that I’d initially used weren’t the ones that Michael would use. (That’s one benefit of writing in a fandom that I’m so familiar with, that the character voices are so natural without my having to come up with them.)

I also ran into a bit of trouble with the very first scene of chapter one, because that was NOT third person limited POV of Michael Guerin. The story actually opens in third person limited POV of Chloe Sullivan, how she runs into this agitated guy outside Oliver Queen’s office, (who turns out to be Michael,) and calms him down a bit. So I suppose I’m going to have to rewrite that one scene much more seriously to get it into Michael’s narration.
Wish me luck with that!