Fandom Fusions

[singedsun]

In talking to a friend of mine the other night, we stumbled on a slip of tongue fusion that I'm sure, someone somewhere must've written already, but like if they haven't and people still have momentum for this fandom... please take this idea and make it a thing. We were talking about Fleabag, as this friend had rewatched the show while they were sick as a comfort watch and we got off on quite the tangent about how great Andrew Scott is as The Priest. However at one point in that chat they accidentally called him Moriarty instead of The Priest (they're a huge Sherlock fan) and OMG the possibilities. EITHER with Moriarty pretending to be a Priest to hide from Sherlock (wonderful thought) OR with the Fleabag format but with Sherlock as Fleabag. I mean the potential. And this is coming from someone who isn't really a Sherlock fan (not the Bendehoop Cucucumber version anyway, give me RDJ & Jude Law please). BUT STILL 🤯 Andrew Scott's flirty sneaky Moriarty is the best choice.

Honestly, I have A LOT of mental exercise fun in throwing random concepts together like this even if it's never something I would write (or maybe even read if someone did write it). Some of my very very very earliest fanfiction was retellings of things like Alice in Wonderland and Little Red Riding Hood and things like that where it's SO EASY to exchange characters into a situation and find a reason for them to exist in this other universe and just figure out how their personality would fit.

In that same vein, it's one of the reasons I like things like the intoabar challenge, because it's all about taking characters from disparate fandoms and smashing them together under a very simple conceit, which is that they are both in a bar. I've done it twice and I think I want to try and do it again this year when it comes around, because I love it so much.

I'm not super interested in a lot of your typical AU formats - your coffee shops, your (high/univerity/magic) schools, whatever. They're not for me, but I can see why people like them. That said, one of the things I do like kind of mashing up (and this will come as no surprise to people who know me here) is that I love to take the premise of a song - something with a strong story preferred, and mashing it up with characters I find easy to write. I think that's also part of why I like fanmixes so much. To bring this full circle in fact, when I wrote a Fleabag story a few years ago for Yuletide, I kept the Priest's speech on love (that he gives in the finale) and sort of wove it through his whole thought process in this future moment when he see's Fleabag again some time in the future. I didn't call them out as speech bits... but it was import to me in the premise of the story that I felt like I was pulling those speech themes into the fic. An interesting adventure in writing for sure.

Less on the topic but I find kind of related is something that used to come up (for me anyway) during old fandom Alphabet challenges where I tried to figure out how on earth two very disconnected characters in a big character rich fandom (like Dragon Age) for example might get together and how they'd get along. It was part of the reason I created the whole ALL CHARACTERS ALL THE TIME pairing/prompt generator for Dragon Age. Like how can I just click a button and have a randomized pairing that I have to fit together somehow. Again, a fun brain exercise.

Comments

[paulamcg]

Thank you so much for sharing such fun ideas - and the whole idea of AUs as fun mental exercises. You make me feel that I, too, should finally let a favourite character go into a bar and... make something totally new happen.:)

[kiranwearsscienceblues]

Haha, I love that into a bar concept. I have one friend who has been involved with an multifandom RP group here on Dreamwidth (milliways_bar) for over a decade with that exact premise -- there's a bar at the end of the universe that snatches up whatever character you want to play from any universe. She's dragged me into Milliways a few times for our various cross-universe character meeting experiments.