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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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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)