This has been bugging me.

[bktheirregular]

A while back, someone sent feedback on "Scarab", asking if I was planning a sequel. Actually, it was more like "please say you're doing a sequel please please please please!"

I wrote back, saying that I certainly wasn't going to write more of that any time soon, especially because I didn't know how the season finales of Buffy and Stargate would turn out.

So I got an IM out of the blue from this person, saying: "the beauty of fanfiction is that you can make your own endings."

I replied that it mattered to me, as I was a slave of canon, and doing a crossover story already was asking for lots of suspension of disbelief even if you didn't veer away from the canon.

The response?

"Nonsense. As soon as you write a Crossover it [is] AUTOMATICALLY A/U."

I don't know. Isn't that one of the challenges of fanfiction? Write a story that could be a part of the larger story, sometimes?

I can understand A/U, but still ... to say that something is AUTOMATICALLY A/U?

Maybe I just don't get it.

Close entry.

Comments

[bktheirregular]

What makes it even more annoying is, I've got three plot bunnies for a sequel to Scarab, but I'm not writing anything because they haven't coalesced into anything resembling a plot, for one; two other plot bunnies got slaughtered by the latest run of Stargate episodes, for two; and three, there is absolutely *no* telling what's going to happen with Buffy at the end.

I suppose I left a lot of people wanting more, though. Even though I tried to keep the story self-contained while deliberately leaving one or two loose ends...

*sigh* Sequeitis is bad enough in Hollywood, where at least there are consequences to making a sequel for sequels' sake that turns into utter trash (i.e. box office disaster, loss of investment, etc.)...

[butterflykiki.livejournal.com]

I'm with Mandolin, they're trying to con you, *and* they're wrong. I hate that.

I get a lot of the same thing, since I wrote the Dawn & Clark stories, and I *meant* to write a story to follow write after - but real life intervened, and then my idea got joss'd on both shows. Being as much a canon slave as Tara and you, I didn't see the point in writing something that had already been shown on one show and proven wrong on another, so I put the ideas for a follow-up in storage.

AU's, to me, are *deliberate*. You decide to change an event, and change the arc and world, and see where it goes from there (i.e., "Eurydice Ascending" - I let Sha'uri live). "Scarab", while it gave all the characters a chance to learn something new about their now-shared universe, did not appreciably mess up their character arcs. It did not change Season 5. It *could've* happened, just off-screen. It is not, therefore, imo, really AU. Crossovers may be so by definition, and especialy in the Buffyverse, where the characters are constantly referring to other scifi movies and shows as fiction, it's something you just have to play with.

But a wish to keep it close to what we see onscreen is totally understandable, especially since you are the one who has to write it, if you choose to do so. Finding out later that something is out of character, or was handled better on the show, is always a pain in the butt.

As for Dru... she was only in my head kinda-sorta for one story, and she still echoes, sometimes. I think it's like an alien mind-set - you have to go so far from your own brain, that it's hard to re-adjust back after you're done telling her story. And ooo, do I want to see what you'd do with her in the Firefly-verse; I saw one creepy little story by Viridian that had her in the Andromeda-verse, but it was only one scene, and I'm not that fond of Andromeda. She would fit in so much better in the post-Alliance world... hee!

[weirdweb.livejournal.com]

Being as much a canon slave as Tara and you, I didn't see the point in writing something that had already been shown on one show and proven wrong on another, so I put the ideas for a follow-up in storage.

Out of curiosity, what got Jossed? I assumed something like that had happened when there was no follow-up, and I didn't want to be a nag. Just curious. :)