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Why Drunkard's Walk is a good crossover
Why Drunkard's Walk is a good crossover
#1
I've been a fan of this series since reading the second step of DW, and even though at the time I knew sod all about GURPS and had merely passing acquaintance with Bubblegum Crisis (though I'm a large fan of Ah My Goddess in the latest step), the crossover (after looking this stuff up) made perfect sense, mostly because the story bent EVERY effort to make me want to buy it, mostly by accomplishing what I call "the fusion effect".
"The Fusion Effect" is when the story first finds a plausible way to insert someone (or many people) from another genre or media into a similar or even totally different media, then spends an inordinate amount of time integrating them into another universe by having them and the characters from the other universes react appropriately to someone outside the context of their understanding.
In DW2, the Knight Sabers come from a world of sci-fi, whereas the hero comes from a quasi-magical world more along the lines of our contemporary reality, and both they and Doug react to the difference in their capabilities with appropriate astonishment, and the other characters in the verse first try to understand the hero outside their context within their own context, but as the story and character development takes its toll, they adjust to the new context in a logical, sensible manner.
It also avoided committing the gravest sin a crossover can commit: not making the crossover believable.
That said, DW is set in a universe where crossover is not totally implausible, much like how it would be insanely easy to cross Doctor Who with bloody near EVERYTHING due to its own built in mythos that allow for all sorts of time and reality bending scenarios.
Another series that is good at this is Super Robot Wars, which, while using plausible deus ex machina, often blends common themes from the different mecha anime series represented and uses them to tie everything together. A similar series is Shin Megami Tensei (which the latest step has definite shades of), which also uses this to good effect.
Drunkard's Walk, IMO, depends less on blending themes (though that's not to say it doesn't attempt to unify similar concepts under a narrative umbrella) and more on establishing a mythos premise that allows an outside context hero to enter other worlds and become part of them without losing either his uniqueness nor transforms into another character indistinguishable from the characters in the borrowed mythos.
Finally, regardless whether "Looney Toons" is (so far), in a universe with cybernetics and robotics gone wrong or a world with a barely contained cold war between gods and demons, the series has yet to drop the ball in making me believe the hero of the story is out of place, and while I detest most crossover because of violations of the above principles, Bob's series has yet to destroy my suspension of disbelief, and I'm eagerly reading his latest work right now as a result.
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