IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FROM SECTOR V:
☣ HOW TO CROSS OVER WITH FUSIONFALL ROLEPLAYERS ☣
After writing for this fandom for a long time now, I’ve seen a whole bunch of traits which tend to come up in crossover RPs with other writers who don’t know the game very well, and all in all make our universe exceedingly difficult to work with. Following is a quick list as guidelines for these writers - by no means feel you have to use them and we won’t throw a fit if you don’t; but it would help us a lot to avoid these recurring tropes we all have to work with in nearly every single crossover RP ever.
READ THE INFORMATION SECTION ON THE WRITERS’ BLOGS!
You’ve never heard of FusionFall before? Okay, that’s fine! You’ve found a blog for a cool Cartoon Network character you want to write with? Okay, that’s fine! You dive right in and then act really confused when your writing partner start talking about war and Fusions and allies? No, that’s not fine at all! Everyone’s confused! Take just a minute or two to glance over a blog’s info section before interacting - or you’ll never be quite sure if you’re walking into an AU or not.
BE CLEAR WHICH UNIVERSE YOU WANT!
The most common - and very awkward - source of conflict with this is when other characters from the same cartoon series try to talk with FusionFall characters - Gwen to Kevin, for example, or Buttercup to Blossom - without specifying they want a straightforward series-canon RP and not anything to do with the game. Something like:
“Hey, Numbuh One, how’s it going?”
“Numbuh Two, good to see you! Have you got those mission specs I asked for? If we can’t distribute them to the heroes soon and get the Townsville Park monsters cleared up the whole place is going to cave in with Fusion goo.”
“What are you talking about? What monsters? What about Townsville Park? We’re in Sector V. You’re sounding weird, Numbuh One!”
Cue two very awkward writers both feeling like they missed something and a disjointed RP which the FusionFall writer is going to be forced to adapt to to save their writing partner having to go away and read up on the game before replying. Many FusionFall writers - pretty much all of us, in fact - do write for our original series canon as well as the game, but you need to let us know in advance that’s what you want us to do!
BRUSH UP (at least a little) ON THE SETTING OF THE GAME!
As mentioned before, this is really important for interactions to go well! You wouldn’t initiate an interaction with a Supernatural writer without ever having watched Supernatural, would you? Or a Frozen character without ever having seen the movie? There are a lot of details to get wrong and interactions to potentially make extremely awkward.
Characters have changed location, occupation and even allies to suit the needs of the Fusion War. Mojo Jojo, Him, Mandark, Mandy, Father, Toiletnator, Stickybeard and Vilgax are “good guys” now for the sake of the planet. Only one of the Kids Next Door can actually be found in Sector V. Numbuh One is Soopreme Leader of the Kids Next Door. Albedo is still out causing trouble and not helping the war effort at all. The Peach Creek cul-de-sac is closed off with an enormous cardboard box fort and Ed is missing far out in the jungle. Buttercup is MIA and the remaining Powerpuff Girls are devastated. Dexter’s Laboratory is no longer a secret and he has upgraded to a massive corporation with lab complexes all over Downtown.
It’s nigh on impossible to enter into an RP basing it solely on the characters’ details from their canon show timeline, unless you’re planning to have your character ask them directly how things have changed. This is negated if the FusionFall writer is the one who starts a thread with you, of course, but if and when we do that we tend to go in either fully prepared to work with only cartoon canon universes or to explain everything from scratch!
THE FUSION WAR IS INTERPLANETARY!
YES, UNLESS YOUR CHARACTER HAS LITERALLY JUST STUMBLED INTO THE FUSIONFALL UNIVERSE FROM ELSEWHERE, THEY WILL HAVE HEARD OF IT.
This is the worst offender of all the common tropes and I can’t stress enough how bothersome it is to have to explain the Fusion War again and again to new characters who seem to have been in the same universe all the time without hearing a peep from it. It’s a global alien invasion! The skies are dark with impenetrable clouds! There’s toxic extraterrestrial goo everywhere and vicious monsters cobbled together from anything unfortunate enough to get in their way around every corner! Entire areas have had to be shut off as “Infected Zones” which are almost too toxic to enter! A skyway system has been set up around half the map simply because the ground is too dangerous to travel by!
We understand if your character doesn’t come from a world like that, but unless you’re literally going to play a “switched universes” storyline you’re going to need to take some creative liberties! We’ve met people before who happily create FusionFall AUs for their own characters - sure, it’s Cartoon Network-based, but who says the Totally Spies haven’t been fighting their corner with WOOHP for months or Mystery Inc. haven’t been on the road trying to find a safe zone - and snack bar - away from all the crazy monsters which suddenly cropped up and are definitely not wearing masks?
Play it adventurously! Give your character a unique universe-specific storyline! Don’t be boring by having them just show up out of the blue and making our characters explain this very noticeable interplanetary war for the hundredth time as if they’ve been living under a rock!
PLEASE AVOID OFFERING TO CREATE GAME-CHANGING SCENARIOS!
This is a less obvious problem (and one that would warrant more research on the part of the guest writer), but still very important. There are chains of events linked together very carefully through the game which a seemingly simple action could entirely undo! Each character (save for the Guides) only has a small role because there are so many to interact with, so sometimes changing something small can really mess up their canon.
For example, Buttercup has been missing in action for a year (though anyone who’s played the game or read the wiki will know where she is), and for a decent chunk of the game the other Powerpuff Girls believe her to be dead. Walking up to Blossom or Bubbles and explaining her whole situation will alter the driving force the Powerpuff Girls have in the war - to find or avenge their missing sister. She is Schrödinger’s Powerpuff Girl, period.
Another example was the idea that came up of adding the Kids Next Door Moonbase kids into the cast. Numbuh One is only the Soopreme Leader because Numbuh 362 is out of action. Like Buttercup, none of the Kids Next Door can be certain their Moonbase operatives are even alive, and the driving motivation for the KND is to contact and rescue those kids. If they do contact and rescue them, well… where has their canon motivation gone? What if the current KND blogs don't want to be forced to move onto ad-libbing the rest of their involvement in the war? With the Moonbase cadets back in the picture, Numbuh One returns to being a regular operative with far less control over the extended branches of the KND, which reduces his role as a character dramatically.
While it’s nice to create and solve minor problems, we need to keep our perpetually unreachable goals for the sake of canon! Every big problem we solve and can’t undo brings us one step closer to running out of canon material, and for a lot of us since there is no canon game to go back to we’d prefer to keep things as true to memory as we can.
Not all of us feel this way so sometimes this is okay, but if you’re planning a SL to move canon events along just make sure to check with everyone it affects first!
That’s all, but please take these guidelines into account and remember them when you’re interacting with us! We love crossing over and talking to all of you, we really really do, but FusionFall is a complicated universe and sometimes it can be very difficult. We do all we can to make things fit, but we need effort from our writing partners too!
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