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Obligatory (but happy!) Yuletide post
My story, Sympathy for the Devil (Dead Zone), is a great look at Johnny from Bruce's point of view, and as a bonus incorporates the coming apocalypse. You could wonder, at the end, whether Stillson or Johnny is the devil; very few bad guys think of themselves as bad, and this story suggests a reason Stillson isn't one of the few.
I haven't read LJ all day, nor have I read too many stories yet, but I have noticed in the ones I did read a number of crossovers with more popular fandoms -- Calvin & Hobbes, Nip/Tuck, Real Genius (blink and you'll miss it), and another. (ETA: also a witty Brimstone story with a Wolfram & Hart name-check.) (ETA2: and a Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell crossover with Patrick O'Brien.) Plainly, Yuletide is an endeavor that can only be sustained by a multifannish community, but I don't remember so many crossovers from years past. I wonder if this has anything to do with LJ and the way we're all multifannish now. My reactions were different for each one: I thought the Calvin & Hobbes story was fantastic up until the crossover, which to me detracted from the wonderful story of how Calvin grew up without losing Hobbes. The Nip/Tuck story worked because it was a crossover; the author did a bit of borrowing from one show's canon to create a scenario for N/T that was hilarious on the surface but extremely creepy underneath. (Extra crossover points for taking the title from a third show.) The Real Genius story works either way because the crossover is barely there and just works as a wink and a nod.
Thoughts on crossovers as the new ground state of fandom?
I haven't read LJ all day, nor have I read too many stories yet, but I have noticed in the ones I did read a number of crossovers with more popular fandoms -- Calvin & Hobbes, Nip/Tuck, Real Genius (blink and you'll miss it), and another. (ETA: also a witty Brimstone story with a Wolfram & Hart name-check.) (ETA2: and a Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell crossover with Patrick O'Brien.) Plainly, Yuletide is an endeavor that can only be sustained by a multifannish community, but I don't remember so many crossovers from years past. I wonder if this has anything to do with LJ and the way we're all multifannish now. My reactions were different for each one: I thought the Calvin & Hobbes story was fantastic up until the crossover, which to me detracted from the wonderful story of how Calvin grew up without losing Hobbes. The Nip/Tuck story worked because it was a crossover; the author did a bit of borrowing from one show's canon to create a scenario for N/T that was hilarious on the surface but extremely creepy underneath. (Extra crossover points for taking the title from a third show.) The Real Genius story works either way because the crossover is barely there and just works as a wink and a nod.
Thoughts on crossovers as the new ground state of fandom?
no subject
Yeah, I was disappointed in that. I'm not an SGA fan, which could be why that rang false for me, but I really enjoyed that story, and to have it suddenly turn into a crossover at the end ...it didn't work for me the way perhaps the author had hoped. Again, probably because I'm *not* a fan of SGA.
I love crossovers, but with something like Yuletide, I wonder if they're not cheating a bit - a safety net for people to fall back on when they're a little unsure of the crazy new fandom they've agreed to write in. Or perhaps a way of ensuring people who only read in one fandom will read a story in another...
no subject
a) it didn't add anything to my understanding of Calvin as he grew up in that story
and b) it merged two different kinds of suspension of disbelief. Believing in Hobbes means going along with Calvin's fantasy, which we don't believe has a factual basis. Believing in the Stargate program means believing in several sets of aliens who regularly meddled in the affairs of humans just because they could. One is believing that the world as Calvin perceives it is a little bit different from the way regular people do, and the other is believing that the world at large is operating on a secret level which is objectively true but most are unaware of. It would be like mixing the magical realism of Like Water for Chocolate and the future scifi-ness of the Transformers.
no subject
It's possible that you could see the ending as an extension of Calvin's childhood fantasies - he's finally discovered that there *are* things like transmogrifiers and time machines and he's going to get to play Spiff Spaceman after all.
On the other hand, it totally jarred me out of the story and annoyed me, like what is this doing here? so you may be right about (b), but that could also just be because I feel overwhelmed by SGA fans and chatter at the moment and having it pop up somewhere I didn't expect was irritating.