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Can everything be a YW crossover?
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sineala asked: Young Wizards crossovers! Why are they awesome? Can everything be a YW crossover? Discuss.These are both excellent questions. I am going to answer the first one via answering the second one, otherwise this will get even more too long than it is.
The answer to the second question is, of course, simultaneously yes, everything, and no, nothing at all. For if you define a 'crossover' as a story that combines several different, unconnected universes, nothing can be a YW crossover, because the story of Young Wizards canonically encompasses all other universes that there are, and therefore, no matter what you are writing, whether you know it or not, you are writing a YW crossover.
...but if you define "crossover" more broadly as entangling two pieces of story that previously didn't formally coincide, then everything can indeed be a Young Wizards crossover! After all, canonically, the YW multiverse includes them all, so there must be a way to cross them over.
That said, some universes are harder than others. And it is curious, given that all stories flow to Timeheart one way or another, that relatively few of our other canons acknowledge the presence of wizardry outright, even those set on worlds that ought to be astafrith. But I suppose that's part of keeping Earth's dominant colonialist/capitalist culture safely sevarfrith, for now.
It is tricky to find the wizards who serve the Powers in some stories, it's true, especially those which have a system of wizardry that is very definitely not the wizardry that Kit and Nita and Rhiow and Ssaash practice. And it's also true that wizardry, as we see it through Kit and Nita's eyes, is very heavily influenced by the way American Christian culture sees the world, and how it sees stories.
But we know - from canon - that the way wizardry comes out in the world can very a lot from place to place, from universe to universe. Probably the best glimpse we get of that is Herewiss's wreaking in the service of the Goddess - which is the same wizardry as ever; after all, Herewiss s'Hearn is credited as an author of the Manual of Manuals - but does not follow at all the same rules as Kit and Nita's, for all that Herewiss's people seem fairly human, and for all that they're pursuing the same goals. So you can actually swing pretty wildly out from what we think of as "Young Wizards canon" and still be within the bounds of Wizardry under the Oath.
In fact, I'd say that anywhere that people are using the Arts of Power "in the service of Life, to guard growth and ease pain and to preserve what grows well in its own way", and sets aside fear for courage and death for life to do so, then they are practicing wizardry, whether they've taken anything we'd recognize as an Oath or not. And if there's nobody doing that, or all of the practice of magic is most definitely not in the service of Life, remember that there are worlds uncounted that are under the Shadow, where there are no wizards, or where wizardry has been twisted very far out of true.
..of course sometimes when you follow that thread you come all the way back to "no YW crossovers at all", because the Young Wizards crossover of a world too deep under the Lone One's power for the Oath to make headway looks a lot like not a YW crossover at all. Obviously, that is when you need to have Sker'ret or Dairine or Arhu fall through a portal and start setting things right. Or, if the world is living and growing well in their own way, at least come through and learn their stories.
Basically, there are several ways to do a YW crossover: one is your basic "okay, if wizardry here works pretty much how it does for Kit and Nita, who would the wizards be, and what would they being doing?" For worlds where that doesn't work - where Kit and Nita's wizardry would not happen - you can have a character from the YW universe fall through into their world, or vice versa, and use them to figure out how wizardry in their world will work. And even without YW book characters, you can always take a world that's deep in the Lone One's power and give a few characters the Oath, so they can start to pull it out...
Although I'd also love to see more worlds that do the crossover by playing "find the wizardry" also take into account the ways in which wizardry might feel very different for those wizards, on very basic levels, even if they're on an Earth that looks like Kit and Nita's, even while following their recension of the oath. Not everybody's "growing and living well in their own way" will look like that. Of course, that's a lot harder to do! And really I just want all the YW crossovers in general.
(btw this is one of the reasons I side-eye the way AO3's tags, in practice, have been leaning toward labelling all fusion crossovers as AU. My story where Sitwell is a wizard may or may not be a crossover, but there's absolutely nothing about it that's AU. :P)
Anyway, I think it's time for another round of "Who in your fandoms is under the Oath, and how?" Who has new fandoms since last time? Who has new wizardy headcanons? Who's new here and missed the last round and wants to play?
My super-duper-new fandom is the Librarians! Because so far it's basically Leverage dropped in a blender with Stargate SG1, as you might expect, given the showrunners! And who doesn't want that, c'mon.
Anyway as fun as it would be to play "who's a wizard" with our limited cast of characters, I feel like with the setup we've got, this is a world (like Alaalu's or Roshaun's) that's traditionally only had a very few wizards. Usually, just the Librarians, and they don't come into their wizardry until they get their interviews.
On the other hand this is also clearly a world that's been falling farther into Shadow - the way the few wizards have all been dominated by ivory-tower-educated white dudes for centuries is evidence enough of that, and what happened to Cassandra in the pilot was classic ordeal-by-overshadowing - if that's the case then the pilot is our first sign that it's time for wizardry to start to change; we have four active wizards at once for the first time since forever The Lone One has been trying to take out all the people who could become the first of the new wizards, but it missed just a few, and just a few is enough... is there a Choice about to be remade?
Though I think there's also room, given the way the Library links the loss of magic to technology and population density, for there to be plenty of non-White wizards out there who the Librarians don't even know about.
(Also presumably Flynn is going to be spending a lot of time wandering in L-space, so there's plenty of room for any crossovers you want....)
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I was writing a more straightforward crossover-- character from Canon X runs into the Whisperer (IDK if the Whisperer is called something else in the main series; I mean the voice-in-your-head that gives cats their powers) and swears the Oath because he thinks it'll get him out of a bad situation, only to then have to actually see wizardry and the importance and possibility of empathy for species you didn't think anyone could empathize with. And so how he would describe it would change, from thinking he made a desperate deal with the devil and has to pay the price, to thinking of it as a vocation that's actually not that bad.
But then I ended up making it heavily about why I don't even agree with the themes in this series. (Reason number one why I'm not actually a YW fan.) And then about reconstructing a recension of the Oath that takes that into account, and is radically different from the normal version and from Ith's version, and yet is what the Oath is supposed to be. It has all the parts, if you break it down very far and then build it back up using basically none of the same words... and if you rewrite it like a lawyer, and if you consciously decouple all three things conflated in the more standard Earth version... so actually it's one of those alien versions that at first blush don't seem to be about the same thing at all.
I hadn't thought to do a crossover by finding characters who could secretly be wizards already. I had thought about astahfrith and sevarfrith and how not only should Earth's wizards know about the character's home planet already, but so should his home know about wizards because at first, I thought it should be astahfrith.
(Then I realized I had an excellent reason for it to be sevarfrith dating all the way back to the time when they made the Choice. It's outlawed, and has been for so long and with such vague terms that basically no one knows much about it at all anymore. Including the guy who outlawed it. Ofc there are secret wizards, but they don't show up.)
But finding characters who could be wizards is interesting. I think it works better for sevarfrith worlds, because if it's never come up before in canon, there should be a good reason for that. I don't really grasp all your Librarians fusion worldbuilding (...you know, I'm not sure if "fusion" is the right word for it; that might be the problem) but it sounds interesting.
Question: are you a fan of the Marvel movies or just the comics?
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I would be really interested in the fic! And reading about the themes you don't agree with - I haven't reread the cat wizards books recently, but in a lot of her books (especially the later YW ones) I always get the impression that when it comes to the big theme-y stuff, there's a lot of posing questions and then leaving the answers open, at least when you look at it all together? That fic sounds really interesting, anyway!
And yeah, I'm at least as much an MCU fan as a comics fan (in that I've seen all the movies and long ago gave up on following the comics more than casually....) I'm not as deeply fannish about MCU Loki as I am about comics Kid Loki, though.
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Ooh, excellent, thank you. Take a look for it in the fandom-stocking collection in January.
(Or sooner. I'll probably be asking for someone to beta soon, if my usual beta doesn't know the fandoms.)
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Leverage + SG1? Awesome.
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There are new books every couple years still (the next one is supposed to be early next year, iirc) but most of the YW characters I mentioned have been around for awhile? Herewiss s'Hearn is actually from one of her other series, though - the grown-up high fantasy Tale of the Five, which set in a high fantasy world where bi+poly is normative, and they have a magic system that meshes pretty well with YW's, and is amazing and everyone should read it. (Rhiow and Arhu are from the Cat Wizards spin-off series
Librarians is good so far! We are only one episode in of course...
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But it's mostly that I was mixing canons with great abandon in my post. ^_^
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And this is why I immediately queued up The Librarians to watch because that is exactly my kind of show <3
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But I really did enjoy how you wrote the Sitwell-Nita fic. I wished I remembered enough to play the crossover game. (I should really reread the books, especially with the Millennium editions out.)
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There's supposed to be a new one out early next year; I'll probably buy the NMEs then and do a re-read again (the series is getting to long to do full re-reads for any less...)
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I stopped reading somewhere in the middle when I got too busy to go to the library *hangs head* Though now since I've been reading ebooks I should really just load it up on the phone. Though a review says the NME versions of all 9 books are out! (Then again, quick Googling is not always the most reliable)
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I was really really into Star Trek at the time, though, and around the same time Nice Guy moved across the country, I got really obsessed with Diane Duane's Star Trek novels, and later her Tale of the Five books. I didn't get around to trying Young Wizards until several years later, because of the bad start I got with them, but once I started I zoomed right through all the ones that were out at the time (It was sometime in the long gap between "Abroad" and "Dilemma".)
And yes, the NME ebooks are a complete set now! You just missed the 50% off Black Friday sale in the author's ebook store but she will probably do another one before too long.
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Oh dear re: Nice Guys =( Luckily mine don't recommend books (though I have a few, in the group of extended friends that I go and watch movies with, alas).
I think I saw it on the author's tumblr, but thanks for the heads up!
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Of course, now I am reading all the 616 fic, and I'm not sure "who is the secret wizard" is a possible question because (a) most of the people who canonically exhibit wizardry are not acting 100% in keeping with what an Oath would presumably require of them even if they sometimes do (Strange, Wanda, looking at you), and (b) pretty much every hero would take the Oath the minute it was on offer and never keep it a secret, because how could you? And why would the Powers not offer wizardry to every hero? So YW wizardry in 616 must be sevarfrith if it's there because otherwise everyone would know it like they know about every other hero. Like, Captain Wizard America only works if Earth is astahfrith, because can you imagine Captain Wizard America hiding that? On the other hand, canonical 616 wizardry is clearly astahfrith, but if one system is, why would YW wizardry be sevarfrith on the same planet? I don't even know.
(Sadly, I still haven't read whatever the latest book is. I keep thinking, well, I'd want to reread the whole series first, and I can't decide whether to try that with the NMEs or the old versions...)
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It's working its way into a fic I'm writing right now, so, spoilers for someone's fandom-stocking gift (not specifically yours or melannen's).
Because the systems work differently, and because only the YW!magic requires an oath of allegiance to someone other than, say, your king. And also because "maximally decrease entropy as much as possible" won't end all life just yet on the scale it's actually possible to do, but to want a world that has anything other than all the atoms of each type separated from each other into perfectly pure substances, and all the heat clustered together in one part of the universe never leaking out into the rest of it, requires having an allegiance to something other than the opposite of entropy. And remember that the Lone Power offers greatness before the fall.
Which all boils down to an initial official prohibition forcing YW!wizardry underground, and then keeping it that way by custom and fear even long after the reason for the initial prohibition is forgotten.
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I haven't read a lot of magic-heavy 616 stuff but yeah you hit the exact same problem with sevarfrith that the Federation does, don't you? Certainly it would be hard to read Galactic Marvel as 100% sevarfrith.... Although I can sort of read some of the magic characters through the lens of wizardry - Strange's backstory isn't entirely unlike that, and I can definitely see a bunch of the Young Avengers being under Oath. ...You might have to take it as being a version of the universe that's got the Oath edited out so they publish it on our earth....
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DD's said on her Tumblr that there are plenty of wizards who are under other kinds of Oaths, so I don't know that it would keep Rihannsu from becoming wizards, but on the other hand... I kind of suspect that there are a lot of Romulan wizards, but the Romulan empire is very, very sevarfrith, and most of them die very, very young, and very few make it to the point where their wisdom outstrips their power. There are a lot of young Romulan wizards and a lot of dead Romulan wizards but not very many old, living ones. (Bets that H'daen tr'Khellian is, if not ch'Rihan's Planetary, then at least a good friend of hers?)
I don't think the Vulcans would have given it up - there's no reason c'thia should be opposed to wizardry, and every reason it wouldn't be - but I suspect that they're in rather the opposite position of Romulans: there's not a lot of errantry needed on Vulcan these days, and the Powers don't call unless you're needed, so there are very few Vulcan wizards; most of them live long lives and rarely go out on errantry (though when they do, it's pretty spectacular.) Vulcan's astafrith - it would be illogical to be otherwise - but like many parts of Vulcan culture, wizardry is something that is not spoken of unless in great need. (Sarek and Amanda are clearly wizards - Amanda becomes Vulcan's planetary eventually, of course - and that's part of their friction with Spock. The Underliers are allies of the One but had a strange Choice and handle wizardry in a very different way.
....the thing about ST:TOS + YW is that, per Wounded Sky, we know that somewhere out there is a universe where the Lone Power is a reflection of the crew of the Starship Enterprise. So IDK. If any of them are wizards, they're wizards who owe allegiance to the Hesper as much as the One - and that probably sets them apart from most other wizards in their universe, and always has, even before they taught Death to the One...
{K's't'l'k, being K's't'l'k, takes a great deal of gentle pride in the young wizards who occasionally address her as 'fairest and fallen'. McCoy took a little bit longer to get used to it. Kirk decided to settle for 'bemused'. Amanda took one look at Spock, after, and told him she was proud of him.}
....somebody still really needs to write me fic about the Lone Power who is made of the bridge crew of the Enterprise, by the way, and how They look to the wizards in Their universe.)
As for the question of cultures that have open wizardry also being sevarfrith - IDK. I think the question of why any given culture is sevarfrith is left really open by canon? That hasn't been explored much. I certainly don't see why the existence of certain magics being open should mean that the entire network of wizardry under the Oath would have to be in the open, though - after all, magic is just another form of technology, and we have technology that's open and wizardry that's hidden. "Magic is real" is an entirely different thing for a culture to deal with, collectively, than "certain children are given special powers by God, and take oath to a separate command structure, and go out to fight a galactic-wide war."
...actually now that I've put it in those terms it makes perfect sense that the 616 Earth would be sevarfrith, because mutants. Mutant politics tell you everything you need to know about why 616 Earth is sevarfrith. And Cap can keep secrets if he's convinced of the need, can't he? Although it's true I don't really see him as a wizard - his talents lie elsewhere.
(IDK, I still don't know enough about Galactic to be sure about anything, but having thought about it, from what I have read, Thanos is a major, major force in Galactic Marvel, and in a galaxy where one of the most important political movers is BLATANTLY an avatar of the Lone One, it kind of makes sense that wizards would want to keep the ability to move secretly as much as possible.
...somebody write me the fic about Gamora's Ordeal. 616 or MCU, either one. :P)
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I would like the librarians a lot more if they were actually fighting the lone power instead of just other people who want access to magic. Actually in some way the way the show that exists (as opposed to the show in my head) constructs their fight, they are working for the wrong side in a Choice: only WE get to decide who has magic. So I like your version better.
Also, Duane has a fannish touch for that level of emotional kick in the gut, the deeply emotional turns of phrase which get you Every Single Time.
Fairest and Fallen, greetings and defiance.