Meta: Crossovers, Play, and "Serious" Literature

[alixtii]

cereta, one of the many fabulously brilliant producers of meta whom I've friended recently, has posted a mea culpa of sorts to her controversial (at least on my flist) essay The Ten Commandments of Crossovers:

[. . .] I can't deny that this play was making a lot of people very happy, and I didn't see that it was my place to piss on their Cheerios by telling them all the reasons they should stop it. I mean, it turns out my notion of play wasn't some folks' cuppa, either, but it sure makes me happy.

Now, I value cereta as a new addition to my flist, and I don't want to piss in her Cheerios (or anyone else's) when she is being gracious, but I do have some issues with her new post and in the spirit of friendly dialectic I commented with my thinky thoughts, and now this post is being cannibalized from those comments, because part of the raison d'être of this LJ is that so when I have thinky thoughts, I can tell to the world, damn it!

My main problem with the post is the following lines:

Well, it's tempting to say I pulled the stick out my ass, but that's not fair. It's not fair to my younger self, and it's not fair to the people who write serious, carefully considered crossovers, because I still think those are good guidelines if you're really trying to make your crossover work.

[. . .]

But I think if I had to give a piece of advice to my younger self, I'd advise her to make it clearer that those Commandments were guidelines for serious stories, to contextualize it a bit more, think more about who might read it and why.

In other words, pissing in the Cheerios of people who are just playing is just rude, but the Commandments do still stand as "guidelines for serious stories," i.e. real literature. I'm deliberately caricaturing what she said, but for me the vibe is there. It's never quited stated explicitly, but there's an underlying sense for me that "play" and "serious" are, if not mutually exclusive, then at least inversely proportional; if we're playing then we're not being serious.

Now, first off, I am thrilled she is making this argument. Goddess bless her. Let me say that again in slightly different words: there is nothing wrong in making normative statements about the aesthetic standards in fandom. She is not saying that the people who break her commandments are terrible people who should have their children taken away from them, and I am not calling out "Oh noes! I am being oppressed!" She is making a normative statement--albeit one which is, in my (just as normative) opinion, wrong--and I am disagreeing with her (because she is, y'know, wrong). Nice, civil fannish dialectic: I don't necessarily have a problem with her trying to impose commandments (although more I more tend towards the "aesthetics are relative and socio-historically constructed" camp), but that I think her commandments (one in particular) are the wrong ones.

Now, for my argument. First off, I must ask, what "serious" work of literature isn't characterized primarily by play? Shakespeare, Shaw, Woolf, Joyce, etc. Literature which isn't defined by whimsy and experiment isn't, IMHO, worth much more than the paper (or monitior) on which it is displayed. (It might make me smile or make me cry, but I cried like a baby at Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights; affecting me viscerally isn't really a challenge and is hardly something of which to be proud.) I don't think play is something we do when we put our aesthetic standards aside and just have fun; it's something integral to the literary and aesthetic processes.

Just because you're having fun doesn't mean--pace likeadeuce--that one is writing a good story, but if one isn't? One might write a good story, a technically perfect one, a remarkable product of craft--sure, you might be able to make me cry--but never a great one.

But mostly, cereta's delimination of narrative-aesthetic endeavors into "serious" and "play" doesn't sit well with me because I don't accept her claim that a mixing of genres can only work in a story which is non-serious, based only on "play," so the result seems to me to be "It's okay as long as you're not attempting serious stories" which strikes me as more than a little condescending. A lot of her pet peeves are mine--indeed, I'm probably an even bigger canon whore than she is, as a fic she recs in her original essay constantly had me frustrated because it's quite clear from the epigraphs even that the Scoobies are at least passingly familiar with the canon of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and yet that knowledge somehow disappears once they arive in that universe in a fic which is not self-identified as an AU.

Two fandoms, I do most believe, can complement each other even--especially--in a "serious" story. Personally, I don't see the point in crossing over two lawyer shows--what can you do in the universe of both lawyer shows that you couldn't do in one?--but having vampires in the West Wing sounds much more appealing. (Actually, my stance tends to be that any text can be improved by the judicious insertion of vampires--but sometimes the improvement works for "play" reasons, and sometimes for "serious" reasons, and sometimes--at the best of times--for both.)

After all, the universes of any fannish text extends beyond the genre story that the text is telling, and it has always been a large part of the rôle of fanfiction to seek out those interstices and fill them in. For example, as we all know, Joss's worldbuilding pretty famously sucks. If I were to write a "serious" post-"Chosen" Buffy story about the characters going national, about them seeking to rebuild and reform the global Watchers' Council, create an infrastructure to find and recruit Slayers, and do so while being allied with an escaped convict, and seeing how they interact with the political structures already in place in a world which refuses to see the truth even when it's right in front of its face (and it isn't always--I'd be perfectly willing to believe that Buffyverse vampires make it a point to avoid D.C. the way they don't hunt on Hallowe'en), I'm going to have to create everything from scratch. I'm going to have to create my own sophisticated political system of witty and intellectual people who are (at least in theory) good at running organizations (which the Scoobies suck at) but are completely ignorant of the supernatural threats which exist in the world (or are they?), and I'm going to have to do all of this worldbuilding ex nihilo because it didn't fall within the parameters of Buffy's generic conventions.

Only, wait, no I'm not. Because Aaron Sorkin has already done it for me. Obviously there are things that are going to need to be either ignored or fanwanked or both--like Angel's entire season 4 storyline--but nothing beyond the skills of a seriously talented storyteller and/or worldbuilder (the worldbuilder can explain it away; the storyteller can make us suspend disbelief and not care).

Many if not most of us (for the value of "us" meaning my flist, plus whomever else might be reading this to which it applies) have written Firefly/BtVS crossovers, fueled in part by the peculiar format of femslash_minis. I've written (and I won't pretend this is anything other than a gratuitous pimp) School of Lost Souls (Fred/River), A Chondrichthyes out of Hydroxylic Acid (Dawn/Saffron), Dear My Ideal Audience (Joss/River/Ari), The Fairest of Them All (Lilah/River), Losing Count (Darla/Saffron), and Twice Bless'd (Faith/Inara, Faith/Mal).

Other than falling under the "umbrella term" "speculative fiction," Firefly and Buffy are two pretty radically different genres. They're the product of the same creator, and some of the same tropes are revisited, but they do have distinct feels and textures (for that matter, Buffy and Angel have distinct textures). But while all of these stories represent instances of play, I wouldn't say they weren't serious stories, although some are more serious than others (just as some of them are better stories than others). "Fairest of Them All" is possibly the second-best thing I've written this year. wisdomeagle's writen playful crossovers which put half of literature in English to shame, in my admittedly-somewhat-biased-by-this-point opinion. (And God, Ari, you know how much you really suck according to those 10 Commandments? I don't know where she'd even put Ann Martin/Elaine Fairchilde--is there any one of her rules which it doesn't break?)

So (to make a post which manages to be even more rambling and digressive than the original response to cereta's post summed up in a sentence-long paragraph containing a parenthetical about as long as the non-parenthetical portion) if we're appropriating the text, subverting the text, slashing the text, taking it beyond the types of stories it was originally used to tell--all very "serious" endeavors as far as I am concerned--then crossovers which mix genres strike me as a particularly effective and wonderful mechanism by which to fo so.

For me, the best part of cereta's wonderful WW/DC snippet, A Crossover that Should Never, Ever Happen isn't the last line which inspired her--although it is admittedly awesome in its will-to-poweriness. The best part is Bartlett's angst, and Leo's response, where she thinks out how would these characters react to that situation, and does some pretty credible worldbuilding in such a short ficlet.

The ficlet made me wonder: how does one run a campaign when there is the paragon of truth, justice, and American values right there? How does the propaganda change? Are there White House staffers who don't buy into the myth? &c. The focus on the humans who run the country in WW, and the focus on superheroes in DC, nicely complement each other in your ficlet. Because the texts she is crossing over (over which she is crossing?) belong to different genres, she is able to do something she would not be able to do within either text alone, something which is genre-bending and thought-provoking and interesting.

"How is this a bad thing?" I asked her. How is it not serious? How is this only play, even if we all agree that play is something to be celebrated?

Comments

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

Just because you're having fun doesn't mean . . that one is writing a good story, but if one isn't? One might write a good story, a technically perfect one, a remarkable product of craft, but never a great one.

Ohh, I really like this (and btw, my caveat to "if you're having fun, you're not doing it wrong" was "that doesn't mean you're doing it WELL, but you're not doing it WRONG" -- and was talking about process, specifically).

But, yes, I like your observation here because -- to paraphrase Mal Reynolds -- if you try to write a story you don't love, "she will shake you off."

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

This post was totally a lot more fun to write than the version I posted in cereta's journal (and even then it required two comments); here I got to put in in-jokes and digressions and asides to flisters and whatnot, including that passage. (Also the tone seemed out of place there, but fits perfectly in my own journal, where pontificating is always the order of the day.)

[wisdomeagle]

Well, let's see. (Just for kicks, and with all respect for cereta, whom I don't even know except in passing.

Commandment #1 I violate every time I sit down to write anything.

#2 I didn't break in the fic in question, but only because I'm not sure which canon I'm less familiar with -- the tv show I haven't seen in a decade, or the fictional-real person I made up in my head out of an "about the author" paragraph.

#3 I think I kept! (Reciting of mighty deeds comes perilously close to this thing you call "plot," which takes screentime away from angst and/or porn.

#4.... heee.

#5, likewise.

#6... but it is my life's work to write every conceivably possible girlslash pairing in the multiverse. I have a higher calling, here!

#7, likewise.

#8 is not notably broken in "Go-Round," but I am sure I have written more than my share of coincidence-based crossover fic.

#9. Um. I can only recall doing this once, unless you count stealing Farscape wormholes to do all my heavy-duty crossover work. Only that probably falls into commandment #5.

#10. Well! This one I don't think I've actually broken. If people are related, they're less likely to have sex with each other.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

If people are related, they're less likely to have sex with each other.

But so much more fun for the reader when they do!

[copracat]

I don't see how you make the jump from 'serious' to 'real literature'. I understood 'serious' to mean a serious attempt on the part of the writer to make the two universes make sense to each other and mesh smoothly. It could still be rubbish writing, even with the best intention and hard work of the writer. Something more playful, such as pentapus's well written and criminally brief stories about Methos in the Pegasus Galaxy don't try to make sense of it at all, don't set up much in the way of backstory, they just smush Methos into SGA and draw out the amusing things that such a contradiction entails.

Though two SF shows are not such a good example, and I should disclaim that I don't subscribe to cereta's original essay and I have friends who quite seriously study play who would describe everything we do as media fans as play.

[beccaelizabeth]

Actually, my stance tends to be that any text can be improved by the judicious insertion of vampires

will soon be doing reading for my English degree
shall try to bear this technique in mind ;)

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

Yes. Many, many, many yesses.

It seems like those Ten Commandments could easily be summarized as, "Thou Shalt Not Write Implausibly." cereta identifies ten kinds of crossovers that are difficult to write and keep believable, which is all well and good -- but instead of enumerating their pitfalls and offering advice for how to take ideas like that and make them work, which I firmly believe and you have clearly demonstrated can be done, she forbids them out of hand. Not showing much faith in fanficcers, is she?

The "playful" vs. "serious" distinction is pretentious as hell -- but it does point to something with merit. There are fics that try to wrestle with Big Ideas and make us contemplate Eternal Truths and feel Grand Emotions, and yes, we do generally ask that these stories be logical and consistent and in-character, because otherwise, we will be drawn out of the story and fail to interact with it on a satisfying level. There are also fics that are there to make us laugh, or squee, or masturbate furiously, and yes, we are generally more forgiving of inconsistencies and logical leaps in these stories. How to talk about the distinction between these two kinds of stories? I don't know. "Good" and "bad" clearly don't work, and I don't think "serious" and "playful" do, either.