![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Crossovers and the heart of things
Oct. 22nd, 2011 08:07 amBouncing through fic archives I found a what if character XY was Immortal fic. So I click, because oooh, shiny! Buuuut... it pretty much right away strikes me wrong.
Because Highlander was all about how where you come from and what you go through shapes you. People weren't just 500 years old or whatever, they were born in 1234 in this one particular bit of France and lived through xyzabc wars and did this and that and the other for a living. It was all about how the past just never goes away. So if you're going to make out a character is an Immortal? That, and not the sword fights, is what makes the heart of the story.
So, stories where people wake up Immortal have potential. Especially after some canon branch point. Especially when we know that Immortals neither have parents or children, so whatever else the character is going through, they have to deal with being adopted when maybe they didn't know that. And knowing however much future they have, some things won't be part of it.
Though if you xover with a decently high tech SF setting the two big deal things would be (a) find how to share Immortality and (b) find how to have children, what specifically is the problem and how to fix it. I mean, even if you have to start with building a genetic code from scratch, there's settings that do that routinely. So past a certain point the setting starts interfering with the angst.
But stories where someone is secretly an old Immortal... yeah, potential, shiny... but they take a whole hell of a lot of thought. With the usual AU problem of preserving whatever was interesting about those people in the first place.
Also, once you add Immortals to any setting that has weirdness that isn't just Immortals, the worldbuilding complicates all over the place. Like, if there are Immortals and vampires, you have to figure out why the vampires don't just have a pet Immortal food supply, hung up on tap. They're the magic guiness glass to anything that needs to feed on humans.
Is much more fun to send Methos to new and interesting places.
... Methos is much more fun.
Because Highlander was all about how where you come from and what you go through shapes you. People weren't just 500 years old or whatever, they were born in 1234 in this one particular bit of France and lived through xyzabc wars and did this and that and the other for a living. It was all about how the past just never goes away. So if you're going to make out a character is an Immortal? That, and not the sword fights, is what makes the heart of the story.
So, stories where people wake up Immortal have potential. Especially after some canon branch point. Especially when we know that Immortals neither have parents or children, so whatever else the character is going through, they have to deal with being adopted when maybe they didn't know that. And knowing however much future they have, some things won't be part of it.
Though if you xover with a decently high tech SF setting the two big deal things would be (a) find how to share Immortality and (b) find how to have children, what specifically is the problem and how to fix it. I mean, even if you have to start with building a genetic code from scratch, there's settings that do that routinely. So past a certain point the setting starts interfering with the angst.
But stories where someone is secretly an old Immortal... yeah, potential, shiny... but they take a whole hell of a lot of thought. With the usual AU problem of preserving whatever was interesting about those people in the first place.
Also, once you add Immortals to any setting that has weirdness that isn't just Immortals, the worldbuilding complicates all over the place. Like, if there are Immortals and vampires, you have to figure out why the vampires don't just have a pet Immortal food supply, hung up on tap. They're the magic guiness glass to anything that needs to feed on humans.
Is much more fun to send Methos to new and interesting places.
... Methos is much more fun.