Which is harder - original universe or mega-crossover?

I was considering this the other day while driving to work. Which is harder to write, your own original*

universe and characters, or a mega-crossover*

by my definition, that means more than four sources

?

In an original universe, the upside and the downside is that you have total control. You can put in anything, but you also have to put in everything. Anything you don't fully consider can end up looking like an Ass Pull or simply massive Plot Holes, but you also don't have to put up with any details or characters you don't want to.

In a mega-crossover, you just have to look up the details and put them all together. It means less frustration (hopefully) and hopefully a lesser amount of writer's block, but it also means you don't have full control over all the elements in your story, and can get stuck with particular details, relationships, or structural elements that hamper the story.

Thoughts?

edited 28th Nov '12 8:08:45 PM by BlueNinja0

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Personally, I find working with established characters to be a fair bit easier (which is why fanfiction is so popular). One doesn't have to worry about inventing one's own characters from scratch and making them good and memorable; one just has to come as close as possible to the greatest moments and characters of the original.

My personal experience seems to bear this out: I spend most of my writing time nowadays obsessing over the fine details of my original sci-fi novel's plot and characters, but the Star Trek/Star Wars crossover I'm also writing is dizzyingly effortless and fun by comparison.

"And every life is a special story of its own." —The Stargazer, Mass Effect 3

Crossovers and stuff that's not mine. I have to do *research*, and not the fun kind.

Read my stories!

Mega-crossover. Easily.

The bits that might make an original universe hard are the ones I find fun. A mega-crossover would definitely be more difficult. Plus, integrating four fantasy universes into each other is hardly a small task.

You will not go to space today.

I would think that a mega-crossover would be more difficult. Even if you're familiar with the original works, it's unlikely that you know everything about them, meaning you would have to research stuff, and you would have to think hard about how all of the different elements and characters would work together. Still sounds kinda fun, though...

I liked it better when Questionable Casting was called WTH Casting Agency

Crossover. You have to fight your preconceptions and biases about the involved elements, and you will almost certainly fail.

edited 29th Nov '12 1:07:32 AM by Night

Nous restons ici.

Crossovers. I want you to think long and hard about this rhetorical question; How many crossovers are genuinely good pieces of writing?

Take away the fan service, the biases, the "wow this is actually happening" factor along with the iconography of them, and you'll find the list to be pretty damn short compared to the full library. With an original universe, you have to take into account plotting, research and creating your own understanding of everything that takes place. With a crossover, writers tend to assume they don't have to worry about the latter two since it's already been established. However, this leads to a ton of problems that are often overlooked. So if you want to make a really good crossover, you have to restrain yourself, which can be one of the most difficult tasks for a writer. If that makes sense.

My name is darthnazgul and TV Tropes has ruined my life.

I am biased here, since I detest crossovers. Smashing two (or more) fictional universes together is never going to result in a clean and consistent story, especially mechanics-wise, without severe effort and familiarity from the author. Creating an original universe may require all those those things to be built from the ground up, but it's a much more organic process.

"The only way to truly waste an idea is to shove it where it doesn't belong."

I find it rather amusing that I appear to be the only one arguing that crossovers are less difficult then the creation of an original universe. While Sturgeon's Law certainly applies and crossovers are difficult to make good, I question whether original universes are any easier to make successful. After all, you aren't starting off with anything established to work with, which means making many more decisions personally.

What is more difficult, coordinating a complex order from a fancy catering service or making an ornate three-course banquet all yourself?

"And every life is a special story of its own." —The Stargazer, Mass Effect 3

That's a, uh, poor analogy.

In that analogy, a mega-crossover would be more like trying to design a banquet from cheap Chinese takeout and Americanised Mexican food and authentic Indian cuisine and and Italian fine dining, where you have to make the banquet seem like one coherent whole and also not weaken the cultural integrity (or whatever) of any of the cuisines because otherwise the fans of that kind of food would get irritated. Plus other considerations.

A mega-crossover is also generally grand in scale while original fiction really doesn't have to be massive to be good, but even if the scale was equal, original would likely be easier.

You will not go to space today.

He adds a good part to the analogy, however I would like to add one more part. For the crossover, like he said, you have multiple nationalities, but then you also have the cookbook already, as well as the meals already made, so you know how everything works, you just need to make it fit together.

While an original universe, on the other hand, is you having to try and figure out how to make a grand banquet from scratch, with no cookbook and nothing at all done prior to your beginning of it.

So I think an original universe is harder.

Except that with meals, you're rarely cooking without knowing any recipes. Same with fiction. Purposely or not, we use inspiration and tropes...

As said in the original post, nothing's new under the sun. You're not creating anything especially new with a banquet. Same with a story.

Personally, "original universe" and "mega-crossover" aren't exactly compatible, due to difference in size. The first one can have a way smaller story than the second one, with the exception of certain cases where you manage to compact a mega-crossover with a flash fiction which is basically bringing in characters in quick succession.

Thinking about it, it might vary based on person. A devout fanboy or fangirl who's an expert in three or more difference stories might have an easier time recycling everything and putting the pieces together while not being able to create anything from scratch.

On the other hand, you have people struggling over predefined content, and find it more liberating to make his or her own work.

edited 30th Nov '12 3:21:32 PM by chihuahua0

Again, the cooking analogy doesn't really work, because unlike with a cookbook (or at least so I assume) in fiction it can be harder to stick to how somebody else did things than to just do them your own way.

Knowing how things are supposed to work and having them actually work that way are two very different things.

edited 30th Nov '12 3:31:43 PM by nrjxll

x3 Not exactly.

You don't have the meals already made in a crossover or fanfic. That would be like copy/pasting large blocks of text from one of the sources, but that would be a Bad Thing. You're writing it yourself, still; for a single-'verse fanfic, it's on you to make the characters sound like themselves, and to avoid making mistakes about the setting and backstory and etc. You have a general idea of what works as the end product for each individual cuisine, if you're a decent fanfic writer. You might even add your own flair to things—headcanons, explanations, whatever—because your mind is bursting with ideas. Besides, you'll need your own inventions to glue different universes together.

If you can follow a recipe properly, you need cooking skills. You have learned the techniques for that cuisine—and for the crossover banquet, four different cuisines—and those are more useful than merely knowing recipes. If you can make the dish taste right, your technique is probably pretty sound, and by then you likely have a taste for, er, how food should taste like.

As stated in the original post and chihuahua, nothing's truly original. Many skills required for writing something original are found in writing fanfiction; you can liken it to learning which spices tend to go together and how they affect taste, and getting a feel for when it's best to put in a certain ingredient, and how to cut onions and how to dice garlic, and how long a rack of ribs might take compared to a chicken leg and how it changes if you're boiling it as opposed to putting it in the oven, and taste-testing, etc. You don't exactly build original fiction from scratch in general, either; you start with an idea which has probably been informed by fiction you have already consumed, so that'd be like deciding "hey, I want mashed potatoes" and, sure, mashed potatoes already exist, but it's used by many restaurants and you're totally free to use it. Maybe you'll play around with spices to make that element more you or maybe it's not that important, just a starch that complements the meat dish. And maybe you're in a genre with conventions, so you know that mashed potatoes often go with a certain kind of meat (although you'll choose your own cut and spices) or whatever.

And who says you've done nothing prior to making that banquet? Maybe you've worked in restaurants before, so you know how to make dishes of at least one cuisine. Maybe your parents taught you how to make the food they fed you. Maybe you've experimented with adding cheese or eggs to a usually-cheeseless/eggless dish, or used half the recommended amount of sugar, or used milk instead of cream, at the very least. Most people don't launch into a writing equivalent of a banquet, which would probably be an epic series of novels or something, without having written anything ever.

edited 30th Nov '12 3:51:00 PM by greedling

You will not go to space today.

I think it depends on the writer.

With Cross overs, how well the Universes mesh together would also play a factor(can you be true to all the involved series, or does the tone of one overide the tone of the other).

With original fiction, it's all about how much effort is put into it, but with less limits on what the characters can do, how the rules work etc.

It's a matter of preference really.

One Strip! One Strip!

Original Universe can also pose a similar question.

One can either stick to one formula or one can do a Fantasy Kitchen Sink.

It depends on the work and such factors as how faithful you want it to be to fact/canon and how deep and complex you want the setting and characters to be.

In this case, I would argue that a mega-crossover is harder, but that's because I'm the kind of writer who likes everything to be just so. If I'm working with an established setting and characters, then what I write has to be pretty well in line with canon. This makes it hard to work with a rich universe such as, say, the Marvel universe; harder still if we're talking about MULTIPLE universes.

You need an adult.

For me, a crossover would be hard just because worldbuilding and creating characters are my favorite parts of writing. Writing fanfiction in general just wouldn't hold my interest.

In general, thought, it is a bit of a toss-up. I guess I'd still go with the crossover, since you have to stay true to so many different visions that aren't your own while still telling the story you want to tell.

Many people have a hard time getting into the shoes of a character someone else created.

Which is one of the big issues with cross-overs.

Do one thing wrong and the fans will hate you forever.

To me, an original universe is harder for me than a mega crossover. It took a while for me to develop a story of my own than when I developed something that coupled others together. Though it is getting easier.

But a megacrossover is tough, too. It's like your need to know all the exact details of the stories and its characters you would include before you write. That's how I learned it at least.