Hypothetical crossovers meme

[melannen]

ellen_fremedon has started a meme, which is terribly dangerous but too tempting for me to ignore, so here:

Let's play the Hypothetical Crossover game! Name any two (or more) fandoms you know I'm familiar with*, and I will tell you how I would, hypothetically**, cross them over!

Take the meme, spread the meme, do the meme, love the meme.


*Fandoms I'm familiar with: written on AO3 (expand full list), tagged on DW (under fandoms: , though note my DW tags are a mess atm); marked 'read' on LT: SF and YA, comics (and art), everything. (If you want to be particularly evil, you can give me two fiction fandoms + a nonfiction book and I will mash all three.)

**I thought about saying that you can't name a pair of fandoms about which you know I have already a) written, b) hypothetically discussed, or c) declared I am not writing, but nah. Just, if you give me one of those, you deserve what you get in return!

Comments

[isis]

Haha, I knew you'd cave!

Dresden Files/Vorkosigan Saga, please?

[melannen]

I've written that one already! :P Sweet Oblivion, featuring Byerly Vorrutyer/Thomas Raith and the Oblivion War.

If I wrote any more of this, it would go more deeply into Alys Vorpatril's involvement with the White Court - I don't think she and Ivan are actually active vampires, but they have connections, and Alys has power (maybe Padma was actually true love for her, so Ivan has White Court blood without any of the disadvantages) - and how the various supernatural groups changed and weathered the Time of Isolation on Barrayar. If I got really ambitious I would tell the story of Mark's slow recruitment as one of Alys's agents in the supernatural world, because you know that Jackson's Whole is up to its ears in vampire and faerie influence.

...alternatively I'd just stick Harry and Miles on the same planet at the same time via ~shenanigans~ and see how many things blew up in the process. That would be more fun!

[finch]

I'm torn between Temeraire and the Princess Bride or Avengers and Young Wizards, so your pick.

[melannen]

Hmm, I'm behind on Temeraire fandom and it's been awhile with Princess Bride, so this will be kind of vague, but the two obvious possibilities are to re-write Princess Bride into Temeraire's alternate history, that is, with dragons. Unfortunately I don't remember enough of the Temeraire backstory on European dragons in the Rennaissance to get a whole plot, but obviously, the Dread Pirate Roberts is semi-feral dragon who picks his own captains, Westley being the latest of a long line, and at the very end, the surviving company leap onto his back instead of onto convenient horses for their escape.

...actually I suspect if I wrote it, it would be sequel-ly, and involve Roberts training his new crew in the art of pirating from dragonback.

(Alternatively you could write a Temeraire-canon story about Laurence and company's diplomacy adventures in Florin and Guilder, but you'd need to remember both canons a lot better than I do for that!)

(you could also do one where Buttercup is a dragon. That would be interesting.)


Avengers/Young Wizards: Let me do a little more thinking for that one! YW crossovers have their own special requirements :D Also I haven't read any of Diane Duane's Marvel-universe writing (I know, bad fan!) and I'd probably want to do that before I dove seriously into my own crossover - especially much of her tie-in writing has elements of the YW cosmology stirred in already.

(Although for a general Marvel/YW crossover, I would - and kind of already want to - write about Helena Rodriguez and the X-Men, which is frankly just begging for stories. Her college roommate has got to either be a) an alumna of Xavier's school, or b) a wizard who does a lot of work with wizards from a Marvel universe.)

[melannen]

Okay, I've seen the movie now, so Avengers movieverse/Young Wizards: During the rebuilding of Stark Tower, people start noticing cats underfoot. Nobody takes note of it at first, because stray cats underfoot aren't that odd in NYC, until someone - probably Natasha actually - takes the time to ask how they're getting up that high, especially with the lower levels of the tower still intact.

Then Thor comes for a visit, and Thor knows the allspeak, so he can hear them muttering to each other about sloppy Asgardian worldgating and the catenaries are still throwing tantrums as far away as Tokyo and somebody call Sker'ret already, they don't have the experience here...

I have no idea where it goes from there but I suspect at some point the cats get to go play 'science' buddies with Tony and Dr. Selvig.

[seekingferret]

Young Adult Novel/ Cthulhu Mythos

[melannen]

I.... I haven't read Young Adult Novel yet.

*hangs head in shame*

You'll have to either give me a Pinkwater novel I have read (mostly these + Yobgorgle and Borgel) or give me a couple of days to finally tick Young Adult Novel off the to-read list.

[sineala]

b) hypothetically discussed

Phooey. :(

[melannen]

You could try it anyway, and see what you get in return! :D

[elf]

I'm caught between an easy-and-obvious and a stump-the-writer combo. So I'll suggest both, and you can either grab one of your choice, or write hypotheticals for both.

Option #1) DCU/Lone Gunmen.

Option #2) White Collar/PotC.

[melannen]

Which is which? :D

Back in the day in PotC fandom there were actually a cluster of modern-day AUs where Jack was an IRS, FBI, or CIA agent, most of which were poly and all of which were good, and now I've got distracted trying and failing to find any of them again. ): I hope they're still online! They were all excellent indulgence-fic for summer nights.

So my first thought is modern-AU for POTC, with the Peter and Neal team forced to work with a Norrington and Jack (or possibly a Jack/Will/Elizabeth!) FBI or IRS or DHS team.

But POTC fandom really has so many possibilities for crossover! And once you have a character like Neal in the picture, WC is full of possibility too. And, omg, Neal and Jack (or Elizabeth and Elizabeth) would be amazing together. The Rogue/Law-Abiding( mostly) Citizen/Sensible Yet Adventurous Woman threesome is really a classic and you could swap them around/pair them up in any configuration between the fandoms.

You could have Neal go after a lost treasure from the golden age of piracy, find it, and discover that it has transported him back in time! And Elizabeth has to go contact her many-times-great-grandparent Davy Jones (aka Will Turner) to figure out how they can go rescue him, and there are Shenanigans. Yes.

...or possibly June happens to own a similar artifact, and an old family story about how to use it, and lets the team have it so long as she gets to go along!

Really the problem here is figuring out what about White Collar wouldn't be awesome in a PotC crossover.

...DCU/Lone Gunmen is harder. Hmm.

[melannen]

No, wait. DCU/Lone Gunmen is obviously a Birds of Prey story. Oracle first messages Frohike out of the blue when the LGM are getting a little bit too close to figuring out some of the secrets of Gotham City, and very effectively keeps him distracted.

"You don't even know if Oracle is male or female!" Langly moans after far too many days of listening to his panegyrics for his new internet friend. "They could be a non-embodied AI and I wouldn't care. Still hot."

Frohike never manages to find out anything personal about Oracle, but she kind of starts to like him, and respect his skills, despite herself, and keeps up the correspondence, once in awhile even getting the LGM to do some research or hacking or publicity for one of her projects.

...then the Birds of Prey start dropping in for visits or pitstops now and then, and Langley changes his mind about Oracle's potential hotness.

Yves must be involved with the caped set somehow, but I don't think we ever find out exactly how, except that she seems to know all of them and they all know her.

ETA: Eventually they end up involved enough in some sort of adventure that Frohike meets Barbara Gordon in person (though she doesn't admit she's Oracle and he's too much of a gentleman to call her on it) and they tango. And it is beautiful.

Presence of anything else in XF canon fully optional. :)

[ellen_fremedon]

Temeraire and the Sherlock Holmes canon of your choice.

[melannen]

Oh god. This shouldn't be so difficult! And yet it is.

I've already done the AU where Watson was soulbonded to a companion animal during his military service, see, so I can't just go for that one.

And starlady has written the one where there's an Aerial Service which accepts women and thus Mary becomes a Captain of the Skies, so I can't just put her on a Longwing and be done with it.

Man. Okay, so, if we keep a world where dragons are about as prominent as they are in Temeraire-as-it-is canon, I don't think Holmes' life would be all that different. He'd encounter Eastern dragons and related concepts during his travels in the East, but that would be about it, really, dragons don't come to London much.

If you instead posit that Temeraire's reforms keep going forward, and England 1890 has a much more integrated dragon population, you run into the problem that I haven't read the last Temeraire book (actually possibly last two now? I really need to catch up) and thus am no longer confident in my ability to extrapolate accurately.

There *is* the story where Madelyn Mack brings a dragon egg of unknown breed home from one of her world traveling adventures, though, and insists on raising it in her chalet. A great many rose-bushes get destroyed in the process, and it follows Peter the Great around like a duckling. Does that count?

...or I guess there's the obvious one where Sherlock is a dragon who has refused all captains until a wounded military doctor named Watson turns up at the aerie on a visit to a friend, and after that they are inseperable and solve all the mysteries.

Yeah, let's go with that one. Sherlock is out of Perscitia by Temeraire, and the only other hatch of that cross - older than him by a [human] generation has settled happily into harness in Westminster, but Sherlock is less willing to sit still and far less willing to take orders (even if Mycroft insists that it's the humans who do what he wants, not the other way around.)

Anyway Sherlock is uninterested in military service, but also uninterested in any of the other employement options available to a dragon of his size, until Watson points out that he cannot feed a gullet of that scale on his pension alone. They finally agree to work as troubleshooters for Mycroft but eventually strike out on their own, especially after Sherlock discovers that there's a hidden criminal network, run by a dragon, who is systematically undermining all of the dragon integration work, and they have to fly all over the world disassembling the network. (Lian is probably involved somehow.)

[marginaliana]

British Comedians/Vorkosigan verse?

[melannen]

So Barrayar is not a planet that has a thriving stand-up comedy scene. (There *is* a thriving community of expat Barrayaran comedians, but we aren't here to talk about Vorfry and Laurie.)

Now that there is planetwide vid broadcast, there's a steady trickle of comedy shows going, though, mostly sketch comedy, broad slapstick/traditional folk storytelling, really dumb sitcoms, and the sort of celebrity interview shows where the comedy is kind of an afterthought, but it's all heavily censored by Impsec for political or subversive content.

Eventually a bunch of young comedians, most of them graduates of the comedy club at UVS, get together, swapping smuggled off-planet comedy vids and muttering about censorship and authoritarianism. Somebody has the idea (terrible, terrible idea) for them to start secretly making, and distributing to friends only, a political satire show, just to prove that they *can*. It's not even outright subversive, more just gently poking fun at the foibles of the Counts, the ministries, and the High Vor.

It accidentally becomes wildly popular, with bootlegs of the monthly episodes being distributed across the planet and showing up on the 'nets, somehow, within hours of final edits. There is panic and dismay among the comedians, because after all they hadn't taken much trouble to disguise their identities, but a core group of closet revolutionaries convinces them to keep going, fuck the man.

What happens next depends on when in Barrayar canon you actually decide to set it, ranging from "Duv Mitchell accidentally becomes a leading public figure in the early days of Mad Yuri's War and somehow winds up on Emperor Ezar's council of advisors" to "Gregor laughs until he cries and tells poor Allegre 'Let's see what happens'.

[lannamichaels]

Sesame Street and Avengrs. (Captain America brought to you by the letter A?)

And Vorkosigan and Avengers. ;)

[melannen]

I still haven't seen the Avengers movie, and I am having trouble working in the hypothetical pre-movie cinematic universe now that I know the real thing is out here, so for these you have to either wait until I see the movie or specify a different Avengers canon. :P

[melannen]

Vorkosigan/Avengers: I have seen the movie now but this shouldn't spoil anything. :)

Dr. Bruce Banner was born on Jackson's Whole and worked for House Bharaputra until he tried to get out, thereby annoying Lord Bharaputra, and signing himself up for an indefinite stint as a lab animal. He was found, eventually, by a strike team belonging to the Dendarii Free Mercenaries, and lacking any better offers, given his unique circumstances, he signed on as ship's medic.

Natasha Romanov was part of the first class of women to graduate from the Barrayaran Imperial Military Academy, and she was top of the class. But opportunies for women are still somewhat limited on that backwards planet, so as soon as she'd served out her initial enlistment, she took off and found a galactic mercenary company that would make more efficient use of her talents. ...at least, that's what she lets people assume.

She met Clint on a mission; he was an exhibition zero-g sharpshooter for a quaddie circus until he got tangled up in Fleet business, and never quite disentangled himself. Where other quaddies stick to zero-g when possible and use float chairs in normal grav, Clint has a disconcerting habit of treating full grav environments as if they're freefall. Basically, never assume he understands the concept of "floors". (Of course, he also spends a lot of time climbing around outside the ship. And has equally good aim with any weapon in any gravity.)

Captain Steve Rogers, Old New York, Earth, was cryofrozen for nearly a hundred years after a mission went wrong, and then the cryocapsule got lost. He was eventually recovered and thawed, but he found that being far out in the black made a lot more sense than trying to fit back into his old life with the Terran Defense Forces.

Tony Stark - well, nobody really knows what Stark's doing with the Dendarii. In an outfit like the Dendarii, you don't ask. He has the accent that comes with having spent a lot of time and money having been trained to a neutral accent, though, and he brought a ship with him when he joined - nearly new, top-of-the-line, and kitted out no expense spared - and then signed it over no strings to Rogers, with the statement that he was done being in charge of things. He drinks, a lot, but he's still the best engineer, computer tech, and subspace pilot in the fleet- even if there's a rumor that he installed his own neural implants - and their combat space armor does things that space armor shouldn't be able to do.

Thor is... well, nobody has ever figured out whether Thor is actually delusional or he's crazy like a fox, but he's very good at hitting things very hard, and much more likely to do it at the right time and place than Dr. Banner is.

Phil Coulson is their Dendarii-assigned fleet accountant. It's standard practice with the Dendarii that every ship carries an accountant, no matter how light on crew they are otherwise. He generally manages to earn his berth, though.

Together they crew the good ship Avenger of the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet, quinjet class, small and agile and nearly as good at getting into scrapes as getting out of them. Also rather more 'free' than most ships in the fleet, given their tendency to take off on private missions without an official OK from the top. Admiral Quinn would be tempted to cut them loose entirely if it weren't for her boss - one step down from Allegre himself - ordering her to keep them on payroll.

[erinptah]

Homestuck and TDS/TCR? (Reportverse preferred but not necessary.)

[melannen]

So the go-to way to do Homestuck crossovers is either a) have them play Sburb or b) have them be trolls or c) have them be humans but with troll romances.*

But you know what? No. Stephen is a carapace. He's a leading figure in the Dersite media, known as the Shouty Commentator. He is of course completely and totally loyal to the Black Queen, and is constantly failing to walk a balancing act between his terrifyingly obvious (to everyone but him) crush on the Black Queen and his utter hero-worship of the Sleeping Heroes (pick your session.)

Eventually the Archangent approaches him, because it is well-known that the Jaunty Satirist - the leading Prospitian media figure - has a soft spot for him. The Archangent isn't sure whether the Shouty Commentator shouldn't be trusted because he has been suborned, but after SC gives him many proofs of his total and complete loyalty, the Archangent instead recruits him to suborn JS.

SC is more than happy to do this! Anything to serve the cause of Derse! But the longer the Archagent watches him insinuating his way into JS's confidence, the more it looks like he might be going native...

Then there are stabs, probably. And Sweetness.


*Stephen, btw, thinks Jon his fated kismesis. Jon lets him keep thinking this because he is the bestest of moirails.

[biichan]

Homestuck/Vorkosiganverse.

You're welcome.

[melannen]

...you may have accidentally tripped one that I was already playing with, um.

-> Be the highblood mutant.



Your name is MILLES KOSIGA, and you are NOT A MUTANT. You have a disorder that affects certain of your chitinous, keratinous, and calcareous bodily structures, but that is due to a DASTARDLY CHEMICAL ATTACK on the breeding caverns when you were just a grub. You were pretty sure you were targeted because you just happen to share the same symbol and blood color as a former IMPERIAL REGENT.

But even if you were a mutant, that wouldn't matter, because you are going to CHANGE THE EMPIRE and do more GREAT THINGS than your illustrious ancestor EVER DID. You have the best lusus ever, a crusty and vicious old SEA DOG, and you have your friends - your moirail, and Greg of course, and there's a girl who you're pretty sure has red feelings for you, or at least could maybe have red feelings for you someday, or, well anyway you have red feelings for her, and why else would she still hang around with the rest of you?

Together, you can do ANYTHING. Who cares about a few broken bones here or there? When you're underwater, you move just as well as anyone else.

...oh cripes. You think you just broke your wrist. Again. Let's go be someone else while your lusus takes care of that, okay?

-> Be Milles's moirail.



You can't be IVVAHN PATRIL, because he is just an INNOCENT BYSTANDER.

Also, he is not Milles's moirail, no matter what the hyperactive little runt might have told you. He is too young to be committing to any quadrants yet. There are PLENTY more fish in the sea, and he plans to catch as many of them as possible.

Why don't you try being Greg instead? He could probably use some cheering up.

-> Be the hemononymous troll.



Your name is GREGOR BARRAH, and you're not sure why everybody makes such a fuss about you choosing to keep your blood color secret. You're obviously a seadweller, so it must be purple, so why do the details matter?

No, you don't feel the need to display your symbol, either. You're going to hit nine sweeps soon enough, and then EVERYBODY will know. In the meantime, you're enjoying your privacy, thanks.

Your symbol has never brought you anything but trouble, anyway. You're pretty sure that's why your lusus was killed, back when you had barely lost your last pair of grub legs. You would have been killed, too, if you hadn't managed to hide.

You're lucky that Milles' and Elaina's lusii have sort of adopted you. Sometimes you don't even feel like an orphan.

You have heard that your lusus wasn't a very nice lusus, but he was yours. And you loved him. Well, you probably loved him. He's been gone so long that you barely remember him.

Dammit. Now you're depressed again.

-> Be somebody else. Anybody but you. Please.



Your name is ELAINA BOTHAR, and you're not sure why your collection of seadweller boys still like hanging around with you, but you like them too!

Well, Milles' romantic adventures are always kind of awkward, but surely he will grow out of that eventually!

When you are old enough to join the Imperial forces in space, you are going to be an Archeradicator. You don't care that your blood caste is wrong, your skill with ARCHERYKIND is unsurpassed. Besides, Milles says he is going to change the Empire, and then you will be able to be whatever you want to be!

You're pretty sure Milles can do it. He does pretty much everything he sets out to do, even if he does sometimes leave an excessive number of burning hives and dead bodies strewn behind him along the way.


....and so on. I could keep going but you probably get the idea. :P

[terajk]

Homestuck & Ranma 1/2!

[brownbetty]

I honestly think Ranma could have been enormously simplified by troll romance.

Prompts

[ysabetwordsmith]

1) The Avengers (Tony Stark & Bruce Banner)
2) Sherlock BBC (Sherlock Holmes & John Watson)
3) Guns, Germs, and Steel (an awesome analysis of how natural factors influenced historical events)

I'd enjoy a high-science plot threat while Bruce and John try to apply handbrakes to two genius idiots who clearly have none of their own, yet still solve the challenge before the world blows up, melts down, succumbs to plague or whatever.

Re: Prompts

[melannen]

You seem to have the plot of this one worked out for yourself already!

...huh, I dunno, so I haven't actually read Guns Germs & Steel - I fell in with a bunch of RL archeologists before I got around to it, so all I know about it now are the things about it that are WRONG WRONG WRONG and why you should never speak that name to RL archeologists. :P

Anyway, given the general premise of that book, and BBC Sherlock as starting points, I would actually be more inclined to start with Mycroft - he seems the type to go for some half-assed cultural engineering, get in over his head, and then bail. He's probably been meddling in some third-world country like the hubristic asshole he is, probably involving not so much weapons of mass destruction as weapons of mass carelessness - famine, plague, environmental degradation, etc., and then a lot of coverups. When the Avengers show up to try to save the people who are still hanging on, they pretty quickly figure out that the British Government is in it up to their eyeteeth, and decide to take on the source of the problem.

...unfortunately taking down Mycroft is sort of like trying to take down Thor: yeah, his brother might hate him, but if you want to hurt him, you still have to get past his brother and his brother's deeply scary and possibly unstable allies first. It is epic, and Natasha effortlessly out-Irenes the BBC Sherlock Irene without even needing any heavy breathing. And then John learns *why* they're going after Mycroft (probably over a pint with Bruce) and the excrement really hits the fan.

[kiezh]

Madelyn Mack on Barrayar?

[melannen]

Madelyn Mack on Barrayar, I think, would just be, well, Madelyn Mack on Barrayar, although possibly with a more Slavic-sounding name. She'd face pretty much the same social obstacles and be just as much an early-adopter of new technology - the technology would be different and her travels would take her farther away, but that would be about it. Nora's life would be different, but I've already covered the issue of freedom of the press on Barrayar.

I'm actually more interested in the time canon!Madelyn Mack got a visit from her old school friend, the former Miss Naismith, who managed to marry herself some kind of Eastern European aristocrat, and is back in New York City to get medical treatment for her young son. ...I'm not sure where it goes from there but I'm fairly sure that eventually the two of them working together basically manage to prevent WWI.

[(Anonymous)]

Since you're apparently still doing this and I want a modern reboot of the Madelyn series desperately: Madelyn Mack/BBC Sherlock!

[melannen]

Have you found the bits of verity's Madelyn/Sherlock crossover? She keeps saying she's going to write more on it, and actually elaborate on the Madelyn reboot, but even that little bit is so perfect that it instantly became my canon for that crossover forever.

...anyway if I wrote that crossover, rather than just hugging and loving Verity's version, it would basically consist of Madelyn and Nora turning up in London on a case, and Madelyn being better than Sherlock in every possible way, starting with her being out, open, and comfortable in her asexual romance with Nora, and ending with her solving the case faster and better than Sherlock could and effortlessly making friends with everybody at Scotland Yard.

So pretty boring, really. :P

Alternatively I could write a post-Reichenbach story where he goes and takes sanctuary with her in NYC, and they are bffs, but that would basically just be a modern reboot of the Madelyn/ACD crossover I've been playing with for awhile where she nurses him back to health at some point during His Last Bow (and then Irene Adler and M-is-for-Mycroft recruit her into MI6.)