December meme: Crack crossovers
[December posting meme daily list, for which I am taking prompts]
Prompt from
schneefink: Cracky crossover of your dreams.
For me to write:
I have been trying, unsuccessfully, for many years, to cross over the Vorkosigan books (primarily Barrayar) with the song Alice's Restaurant Massacree by Arlo Guthrie.
Yes, this is entirely on the Alice/Alys thing.
The reason this has been as of yet unsuccessful is that Alice's Restaurant is a very strange beast. For those unfamiliar with its glory, it is an 18 minute long song in two main parts: in the first, Guthrie and friends go visit Alice for Thanksgiving and are arrested for littering (we had never heard of a dump closed on Thanksgiving before and with tears in our eyes, we drove off into the sunset, looking for another place to put the garbage). In the second part of the song, Guthrie shows up at the draft board and gets put on the Group W Bench and is asked if he's rehabilitated himself... from littering. Guthrie then exhorts the audience to get out of the draft through the power of singing Alice's Restaurant.
It is an anti-war song. The Vorkosigan Saga is many things, but you have to squint a bit to see it as anti-war.
And this would not be the problem except the structure of Alice's Restaurant needs two parts: the comedic set-up, and then the abrupt topic shift: But that's not what I came to tell you about. I came to talk about the draft.
As for what the fic would be about, clearly it would be bodybirths. That's the easy part. But trying to get all the moving pieces to work together is difficult.
The other easy thing: the summary would obviously be: This is a fic about Alys.
For someone else to do:
WESTING GAME CROSSED OVER WITH LES MISERABLES.
It would of course be called "The One Who Wins The Windfall Will Be The Ones Who Believe In Collective Action". I know this because I have a document in scrivener that is 22 words long, and that is 15 of those words.
I have zero ideas of how to make this work. Of course they are somehow Westing heirs. Is Valjean playing the part of Westing? That doesn't seem like Valjean. Is Valjean one of the heirs along with some of the Amis? WHO KNOWS, I DON'T.
But anyway they are Westing heirs, maybe, and maybe this takes place in the 1970s or maybe in the 1820s-30s. How does the world building even work? What's the game?
I don't know, but they win it through collective action.
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1019909.html.