Random fanfic thought

[robotech_master]

I've been catching up on a couple of shows I've let skate the last few weeks—Torchwood and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

It just occurred to me: Wouldn't that make a great crossover?

Comments

[foomf.livejournal.com]

I did!

Seriously, I'm allergic to whole-cloth crossovers of worlds that don't fit in the same universe. It comes in part from a dislike of poorly done genre bending.

I was going to use a couple examples from Star Trek when I realized that "The Omega Glory" - the second most horrid of the bad Star Trek TOS stories - was actually not genre bending, but "identical earth" instead. Anyway.

Here's the thing: if a story universe is complete and complex, and if another story universe is also complete and complex, and you jam them together, they no longer fit together because the histories of the two will not be compatible, and in fact would be mutually exclusive.

The only way to write such a thing is to have it take place outside the contexts of the story universe, that is, to have a third context which hosts them. If you simply state that they are a part of the same universe, then you have created conflicting histories and impossible present-times, and what you get is effectively the same as painting a copy of the Mona Lisa and a copy of Whistler's Mother, and while they're still wet, mashing them together face-to-face and peeling them apart to see what you get.

In a well-written story there is always a consequence to an event. A crossover is an event. Unless everyone forgets it completely afterwards or it never reverts, when you cross over two universes in a third universe, you end up with them returning to the original universes WITH the consequences.

Torchwood and Terminator++ ... here's the rub.
While Torchwood might in theory permit any kind of crossover (with attendant, obligatory sex with Captain Jack) the story itself is firmly rooted in the Whoniverse. The Rift is the gimmick permitting the crossover, but it's already in conflict with the whole "Universes are supposed to be walled apart" thing that keeps coming up in Dr Who, and is the reason why the Doctor cannot go back to play with his Bad Wolf (in any reasonable fashion, even though they keep retconning it.)

Anyway. Torchwood, if it hosted the crossover, would safely shrug it off. T++ however, which is character-driven, could not shrug it off; the existence of alternate safe universes and ways to get humanity to safety would be a distraction and pollution of the Terminatorverse theme.

Is that a more palatable explanation of why I dislike crossover stuff?