Crossovers and the heart of things
Oct. 22nd, 2011 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethBouncing 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.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-25 09:53 pm (UTC)And the layout on your journal is *lovely*!
Immortals and Vampires
Date: 2011-10-25 10:07 pm (UTC)Of course that doesn't work for vampire versions with more of a science base. For that the trouble is whatever you do is science and has as many implications for humans as vampires. If the Immortal healing factor in their blood conflicts with the Vampire healing factor and tries to turn them human, that would be fascinating, and also make Immortals as vulnerable to humans who fight vampires as they would otherwise be to vampires. If they simply don't have the nutritional content of human blood, if they're enough of a different species not to fit, that might also explain why they aren't good organ banks. Or perhaps they need the Quickening to keep every cell alive, and once blood is removed it gets dead so fast it's rotten in a vampire's stomach. Whatever you do to it, if it's science, you end up with a blood test for Immortals. You probably end up with a blood test for pre Immortals. Which has all kinds of potential...
Whatever the problem with the blood is, biting them is probably like biting a Taser...
... yeah, I think about this a bit often.
xovers with a vampire containing 'verse also have to ignore or explain the episode with the Immortal who pretends to be a vampire, and Duncan not believing there are any vampires.
xovers with Stargate Atlantis, and the space vampire Wraith, have a pretty good explanation built in, seeing as the vampires are in a different galaxy. Wraith take life, not blood, though, so it's kind of more fun to leave Immortals edible yet having to explain why they haven't visibly aged. Or a different kind of fun if they do visibly age, because how much would that weird out a thousand year old Immortal, to look different in the mirror after all this time?
Plot bunnies: endless.
Probability of me writing them: low.
Thankfully there's a rest of the internet that writes a lot more.
The journal is trying to look like the walls in my front room, only with all the books you can't see but a few inches of wall in here anyway. :-)