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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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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!