Crossovers.
Jul. 9th, 2025 02:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rogueslayer452Sometimes I wished fandom fucked with crossovers more like it used to. *
Maybe I'm not looking in the right places since I know it stills happens, it's just that I remember when fandom crossovers were a massive thing especially during my early days in fandom. Yeah, fanfic fusion AUs exist, but it's not the same. There would be fanworks of various kinds where alternate universes featuring different fictional worlds would visit each other, either already existed in or created a kind of wormhole or portal to go into each other's world. It didn't need to make sense, it just needed to be like "how would these characters from this story interact with these others from this other story?" and that's that. But I rarely see those kinds of fanworks anymore, at least not in the way that it used to thrive in fandom spaces. I only see aspects of it now among the cdrama fandom. Of course, this is mere speculation on my part, I kinda theorize that the rise and fall of SuperWhoLock sort of got people to shy away from doing crossovers in such a way, because it was viewed as "cringe" since it was everywhere and dominated a lot of the fandomsphere especially on Tumblr. Which would be a shame if that were true. There is something amazing and uniquely fannish about crossovers, whether it be fanfiction, fanart, fanvids, or classic image manips, it's always been interesting to see the kinds of creativity fandom can come up with. You might not always know the fandoms in question, but it's nice to see people having fun.
(* I'm including myself in this as well, since I had once created some crossover fanworks in the past but have also unfortunately fallen off that wagon and need to get back on.)
Maybe I'm not looking in the right places since I know it stills happens, it's just that I remember when fandom crossovers were a massive thing especially during my early days in fandom. Yeah, fanfic fusion AUs exist, but it's not the same. There would be fanworks of various kinds where alternate universes featuring different fictional worlds would visit each other, either already existed in or created a kind of wormhole or portal to go into each other's world. It didn't need to make sense, it just needed to be like "how would these characters from this story interact with these others from this other story?" and that's that. But I rarely see those kinds of fanworks anymore, at least not in the way that it used to thrive in fandom spaces. I only see aspects of it now among the cdrama fandom. Of course, this is mere speculation on my part, I kinda theorize that the rise and fall of SuperWhoLock sort of got people to shy away from doing crossovers in such a way, because it was viewed as "cringe" since it was everywhere and dominated a lot of the fandomsphere especially on Tumblr. Which would be a shame if that were true. There is something amazing and uniquely fannish about crossovers, whether it be fanfiction, fanart, fanvids, or classic image manips, it's always been interesting to see the kinds of creativity fandom can come up with. You might not always know the fandoms in question, but it's nice to see people having fun.
(* I'm including myself in this as well, since I had once created some crossover fanworks in the past but have also unfortunately fallen off that wagon and need to get back on.)
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Date: 2025-07-12 10:11 pm (UTC)I'm mostly thinking about the acceptance of general fandom overall, because although I was exposed to crossovers during my early days of fandom I have no idea how niche even that genre is within fandom spaces as a whole. Of course, as you said, every individual fandom is different, some are more accepting of the concept than others, and I think as long as you find those little communities of your fandom that have what you're looking for it doesn't matter what the rest of the fandom (specific or in general) think.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-12 11:23 pm (UTC)I'm also a bit biased in that I was so overwhelmed by crossovers in my early days in fandom that they turned me right off the concept entirely. One of the earliest scams I got introduced to on fanfiction.net involved someone trying to "make" a giant crossover fanfic similar to Kingdom Hearts. I only got into writing my own crossovers relatively recently and it gave me appreciation for it as a concept, though I'm still not a fan of massive crossovers. But at least in my experience, crossovers definitely thrive in many, many fandoms on Ao3, fanfiction.net, Wattpad, and tumblr.