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

Comments

[tacky_tramp]

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.