Timetravelling and Crossovers

I have to admit, it's hard to do these kinds of fics and make them seem credible. I think people usually write them as straight humour so they're not all that in character much of the time (for humour value) and kind of have no plot. I'm not really a fan of slapstick adventures, so I try to avoid those.

But have you ever attempted to write one? Have you read any that came out well? Because I think this is an obscure little niche that has the potential to be fun but also makes for interesting character interactions.

Personally I approach the topic kind of warily, but I couldn't resist the idea of writing a SW/Indy crossover back in 2000-2001. The fic, to my great happiness, got a good response here. It was certainly unique It was about Han and Leia travelling accidentally through a blackhole and ending up on Earth. They run into Indy, and soon the Nazis become involved As a big Indy/SW fan, it was very fun to write, however I didn't want it to be campy, so I worked really hard on the characters and plot.

Soon after this, due to the reception it got, I wrote a sequel fic to that one. This time Han and Leia bring Luke along with them to Earth, but they decide to bring Indy back to the GFFA instead. Only something goes wrong and they end up...well I'm not saying, except to say that it's somewhere in the PT and on a planet that comes as a shock to them. Obviously there's some PT character involvement there which I had loads of fun with. Again I tried hard to work on a solid, interesting plot while still allowing for good character dynamics. I think it worked out right. It took me forever to finish

Anyway, I was interested in knowing if anyone else here has written or read any of these type of SW fics that they might recommend, because I would be interested in seeing someone else's interpretation of the genre. I'm also interested to hear everyone's thoughts on them in general.

-sj loves kevin spacey

 

Yes, I tried writing a bit of rubbishy stories involving Starwars, Lord of the Rings,The Matrix and Pirates of the Carribean. It's not my usual writing style though.


Lord of the Rings/ Starwars

Aragorn and Legolas rush across the Forests of Endor.

Toward Isengard, the great tower, where Jango Fett dwelled, with his clones and goblins.

Their mission was to go and ask Jango if he had news of Princess Leia of Rivendell, and her sister, Eowyn of Alderon.

ARAGORN : There?s no way we?re going to get to Isengard at this pace. It?s too far away.

LEGOLAS : I sense a great disturbance in the Force.

ARAGORN : Strange that I do not.

LEGOLAS : That?s because you?re not an elf.

ARAGORN : Elvish blood runs through me still. For I am Aragorn, son of Arathorn, Man of the Westernesse, wielder of Anduril, flame of the west, Ranger of the North, descendant of Isildur, Heir to Gondor, King of?

LEGOLAS : Ok, shut up

They continue moving through the forest, and they hear someone whistling the Indiana Jones theme.

They see a person riding a horse. Behind him two horses follow white as snow. At his belt, he had a blaster. The chap stops to talk to the man and the elf.

HAN : Han Solo. I'm captain of these Mereas, horses of Rohan. My smuggler instinct tells me you're looking for horses to get to Isengard.

ARAGORN: Yes, indeed. Are they fast horses

HAN: Fast horses? You've never heard of the Mereas of King Theoden

ARAGORN : Should I have? I?ve been North protecting the shire lately, sometime I hang out in Bree, and go to Mos Espa Cantina, I?m from Gondor?sort of, See my descendent?s island in the west sea sunk due to an earthquake. I?m supposed to be a King, but no one cares about me, and Denathor just sits down, looking at the Palantir and orcs pass by and?

LEGOLAS : shut up!

HAN : They?re the horse that made the Kessel run from Minas Tirith to Fangorn Forest in less than twelve parsecs!

Aragorn reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation.

HAN : (continuing) I've outrun goblins and orcs, not the local ones of Moria that fear the sun, mind you. I'm talking about the big Uruk Hai of Mordor now. The horses are fast enough for you, Ranger. What's the cargo?

ARAGORN : Only passengers. Myself, the elf... and no questions asked.

HAN: What is it? Some kind of local trouble?

BEN: Let's just say we'd like to avoid any Mordorian entanglements.

HAN: Well, that's the real trick, isn't it? And it's going to cost you something extra. Ten thousand, all in advance.

LEGOLAS: Ten thousand? We could almost buy our own horses for that!

HAN: But who's going to guide them to Isengard, elf? You?

LEGOLAS: You bet I could. I'm not such a bad rider! We don't have to stand here and listen to this...

Legolas starts to get up, but Aragorn forces him back down.

ARAGORN: We haven't that much with us. But we can pay you two thousand now, plus fifteen when we reach Isengard.

HAN: Ok, lets go.

The three ride through the forest of Endor. (Han Solo continues whistling the Indiana Jones theme.)

They see Robin Hood and some outlaws shooting Ewoks from trees.

They also see Rumplezilzkin chanting round a fire, happily roasting Ewoks. ? La La La. I?m not a wizard!? he calls, ? But I look like one. La La La. People think I?m as important as Gandalf, Saruman and Radagast, but I?m not. La La La?

They also see Snow white walking down the yellow brick road that passes through Endor and the seven dwarves follow her in a single line.

They?re all singing ?Hi-Ho Hi-Ho, It?s off to work we go. With shovels and picks we kill them Orcs. Hi-Ho Hi-Ho Hi-Ho.?

But the last dwarf, called Gimli suddenly rushes off alone.

?I?m fed up!? he screams. ?I?m going back to the Iron Hills to go in the Halls of the waiting, to sit besides my fathers until the world is renewed.?

No one seemed to take any notice of him. (You may find this strange, but stuff like that happened all the time in the Forests of Endor, that were much la

 

Well, Hai Gan's Buffy crossover is great, when she manages to update it. Set during Season 5, with two Before-era Jedi teams crossing through a time rift to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a monastery... It's in the Classic board.

Usually, when a popular film comes out, someone tries something. I know I've seen Harry Potter, LOTR, X-men, Star Trek and a few others. And there have been a few time travel "Jaina & Jaicen go back to Episode I" types of things, or "Obi-Wan & Anakin go forward to the NJO." I haven't seen many lately.

If you're being serious about it, it's a very tricky genre to write; hard to keep it believable. A lot of people play it for laughs. But it can be done & done well, if you are true to the characterizations.

 

I love time travel stories, although I've seen very few here. The first story I actually posted here was a time travel story, called 'Redemption in Time', where Obi-Wan confronts a young Anakin. I sorta avoided the explanation for time traveling, though, since it was a short vignette and black holes or time machines would be kinda out of place.

Marnie wrote a really good one, called 'Redemption.' (And I thought my title was original! ) It's set in the prequel era, too, if I remember correctly.

I haven't read that many crossovers here, but a good Lord of the Rings one is "Not All Who Wander Are Lost." TPM characters join the fellowship. It's unfinished, and seemingly abandoned.

The only other crossover that I remember is "Ward" by cathypauline. It's JA Obi-Wan, Xanatos, and Star Trek: the Next Generation (primarily Will Riker and Wesley). The story's not on this site, I think it's on ffn or Jedi Apprentice Fan Dimension.

Actually, there's a Star Trek: Voyager crossover by CalaisKenobi which is in-progress, over on the Before the Saga board. I believe the title is "Across the Tide of Time."

 

One thing iv noticed and avoided reading is were an Author tries combing TOO MANY serieses into one serious story, which ends up making it basicly unreadable because you either dont know one of the series or you cant be bothered reading about something other than the gendre that you were looking for, like i love a lot of show, 'cept i genrally only read about SW and Final Fantasy.

 

I read one once where Luke and Mara wind up on Voyager. it was an awesome story.

I like crossovers as long as I have an understanding of the place star wars is crossing into.

time travel is fun to read to a certain point but it is fun to read if you get into it.

 

Renata I completely agree on it being hard to do seriously. That's why for the Indy one I did a lot of research on Nazi Germany and used authentic German dialogue and actual characters from the era. And in both stories (as in all my stories unless they're out there humour) my biggest concentration is on proper characterization. It's hard to do, but I appreciate it when authors can write serious crossovers well (and still make it fun ).

-sj loves kevin spacey

 

Like Renata said - if you really want to see a good cross over then check out HaiGan's it's incredable. Derisa's cross over with King Arthur's court and the Jedi Knights is fantastic as well!

Kithera

 

It CAN be done. Did Calais pick it up again? I thought she'd dropped it! I'll have to go check it out, if it's the one I'm thinking of; it was excellent!

 

I did write a crossover once between Star Wars/Farscape. It was actually my first NC-17 fanfic but when I came here to the board, and seeing how many other genres have been blended together, I began to rethink my position about crossovers. To me, it seemed any big movie of that time (Spiderman, DareDevil, Lord of the Rings) someone felt the need to make a crossover for it. These are genres I'd never venture into myself because they seem rediciulous to me.

I did think about making a crossover one time between Buffy/SW but I never went through with it.

On the issue of time traveling, I have done this. I remember working on a time travel fic for Adventures of Ana & Owen, as a way to connect the series to the SW prequels. It can be done too as long it is done well and is believable.

~aeryn

 

My first fic was a SW/trek crossover. Basicly, I had a single shuttle craft an a trek OC get stuck in the GFFA. It has a small audince, bit is well liked by them.

 

Listen to Healer Leona! Frostfyre's Elementary, My Dear Obi-Wan is the best crossover out there, even if the premise does sound odd. Who would think that Sherlock Holmes and the Jedi would mesh well? But they do - and Frosty does an incredible job with it.

Shaindl

 

I can't say I've ever done a crossover fully. I've made a few attempts but they always seem too contrived to continue further. I'd like to give it a shot though.

 

I love timetravel stories, and I'm also quite addicted to bringing people back from the dead. It doesn't always seem credible, though. Think really hard and research different time travel theories if you're writing time travel. And don't just have somebody travel through time or pop back from the dead just for the sake of it. If you do it, have it move the story along.

I'm not too keen on crossovers, but time travel stories are marvelous for interaction. Think of it--Luke and Leia missed out on knowing so many people in their family. The Skywalker family, in reality, was huge, but it got whittled down to just Luke and Leia. I often find myself how Luke would have gotten along with Shmi Skywalker or what Bail Organa would think of Han. And it's hard to do stories like that. But it's also a blast. If you get a wierd idea, write it down. You don't necessarily have to post it, but get it out. It always helps.

 

I like reading certain types of crossovers, but generally I don't like ones where it's improbable, I like crossovers where the reason for one getting into the other is possible. Ones where they're just there, I can't stand it's to bloody confusing. I also have to know both stories to be able to understand it a lot.

As for time travel I'm writing one right now, the link is in my sig. The same as the first one, I like ones where it's possible and it works.

 

I think a large part of the reason I (and, I suspect many people) rarely ever read SW crossovers is the inherent contrivance. SW does not naturally overlap with other series. It's set in another galaxy in the distant past, and it features neither time travel nor weird Trekkian spacial anomalies. This usually means that unless the other series involves healthy amounts of both time and space travel, then some outside catalyst alien (no pun intended) to both source texts must be grafted on just to bring them together. And no matter how well written this part is, that will be hard for a lot of readers to take seriously.

Of course this, not characterization -- which is as important to good comedy as it is to the most po-faced drama -- is why most SW crossovers tend toward the humorous. It's a variation on the "If you can't beat them" principle: If you can't escape the silliness, embrace it.

Now, as I said, sometimes the other text allows for serious crossovers. Doctor Who, in which the main characters can go anywhere in time and space, is like O blood, crossing over with just about everything. Star Trek has some time travel, but more importantly, it has both the spacial anomalies -- wormholes and weirder -- and nigh-omnipotent godlike beings who can throw characters across the universe. Then there are series that either do or could take place in any part of space-time because there's little or no connection to Earth or which have alien races that could be old and well-spread enough. For example, you could have SW characters find the creatures from the Alien series on some planet (but not Ripley, please). [Naturally, each of these examples shows the other series' elements transplanted to the GFFA rather than the other way around.]

 

Actualy, Ive found using a spacial anomly to initiate a crossover works fairly well if you simply state thats what happend and get past it.

When I did it, none of my readers complained, and they seemed to enjoy it quite a bit.

 

Doing crossovers the other way (meaning, the GFFA characters go to the universe you're crossing Star Wars with) almost implies you're going to employ an AU element to justify the Star Wars characters entering their "new world".

I don't know whether anyone did a full crossover here - meaning, whether anyone intermingled an entire Star Wars Episode or novel with an entire unit of the stories about the universe they're crossing Star Wars over with. This certainly is the hardest kind of crossover to pull off, and involves both a lot of imagination and tightproof rigor when writing down your plot.

Learnt this the hard way ( ), I had of old tried to post a Dune / Star Wars crossover, but I didn't really know where I was going. I had only laid out a vague scenario and so even though it had been relatively easy to enter GFFA characters (nominally, Luke, Han and Chewie) in the Dune universe, it was a lot harder to make them fit when they arrived.
Well, never posted the rest of the shaky stuff anyway

 

I think that crossovers in general are pretty tough to do, if you're attempting for a serious fic (humor crossovers aren't that hard, I think). The fact that in a crossover you have two universes blended in one can result in having your characters get out of character. I haven't seen many crossovers that are REALLY good, but there were some very good, like the one West Wing/Star Wars crossover by p_stotts (forgot its name, but it was way back in 2000 or 2001), and currently Elementary, my dear Obi-Wan by Frostfyre (a Sherlock Holmes/SW crossover) - this one I deem the best crossover ever written (well, OK, the best one I've read ), because not only all the characters are amazingly in-character (not just the Jedi, but also Holmes and Watson), but Frosty managed even to grasp Conan Doyle's writing style very well, so you really have the feeling like you're reading one of the Sherlock Holmes stories - only that this one features Jedi Knights.

 

Drabbo - I would have to disagree with the notion SW does not have weird Star Trekkie things happening. Several Pro novels show this. The entire NJO "intelligent, talking" planet is weird and Star Trekkie! And "tears" that heal? The notion of the "Force" is an anomoly, all by itself!! Science Fiction, by its very nature, is weird. Crossovers can be fun, and since you don't have to deal with "real" you don't have to spend time pondering what is "impossible" or "possible".

I love Carolyn Golledge's cross-over stories, and I have written one myself, even though I made very certain not to tell my readers in the beginning of the story that it was a crossover. (I did tell them to be prepared for the bizarre! LOL) My readers seemed to like the story, and even those that said they normally don't care for crossovers said they liked it.

But, honestly, I have been a ST fan for many years, and "anomolies" and "time travel" don't bother me in the least. I think they are a fun tool to use in Science Fiction, and I see no problem using them in the Star Wars world.

 

Yub, so long as you know what you're doing, it works fine

 

Science Fiction, by its very nature, is weird. Crossovers can be fun, and since you don't have to deal with "real" you don't have to spend time pondering what is "impossible" or "possible".

And that is a philosophy with which I disagree very strongly. Just because something's SF doesn't mean you can throw whatever you want into it without worrying about verisimilitude. Yes, the GFFA has tech we don't, and yes, some of the laws of physics (like sound in space) work a bit differently there, but there are still things they don't have and can't do. Treating it any other way is like poorly characterizing the universe.

 

Point taken, but let's not forget something : maybe some factor doesn't exist in the SW universe because it hasn't been invented (time travel) or because the feature isn't present in the GFFA (no space anomalies à la Star Trek). The trick is to take it into account logically, but if you're careful enough when you lay out your story, almost everything is possible.

Let me give an example (I'm nowhere near posting this, so it won't do no harm).

In the Dune universe, space travel relies on Guild Navigators, whose prescient capabilities allow to calculate perfect ways of travelling to any part of the universe instantly - without actually moving (it is a bit akin to clever use of teleportation, and the pseudoscientific explanations of the uses of the Holtzman field are quite well planned).
Since the Guild has found such an efficient way of travel, no one ever bothered to develop another way. And space travel in the Dune Universe relies entirely on the Guild.

Now imagine throwing in the Star Wars technology. Suddenly, you have technology that allows travel at a much slower pace, but which allows you to dispense yourself from using Guild services. And you needn't develop the actual technology, it's at your disposal for replication in the Dune universe. The impacts of this are many, and let me just quote a few which are perfectly rationnal in my plotline :

1) Since the GFFA Empire can navigate the Dune Galaxy without help from the Guild, they can play out of the rules and use their navy as they see fit.
2) However, the Dune armies still have the advantage of mobility.
3) They are distinctly at a military disadvantage, since most of open Dune universe wars are fought on the ground.
4) Throw in covert cooperation between Guild Navigators and the Rebel Alliance, and you have perfect hit-and-run capabilities.

 

Okay, an interesting comparison, but how do you deal with the hiccup that the Empire crumbled to dust millennia before the Guild was (or, rather, will be) founded? Given the apparent breadth of your intent, it looks like the only solution would be to throw out the "A long time ago..." to make the two contemporary.