Introduction
First things first, I don’t know who made the image in the banner. If any of y’all know, let me know so I can give them credit.
Now for the actual introduction. Sorry that this is a mile long:
What this is
I’m basically analyzing different collaboration skins in Fortnite and giving my opinion on whether or not they make sense in the game from a lore standpoint. I know that there’s always some stretch from the lore to the gameplay but some of these are stretched too far.
Why I Started this Blog
Fortnite is well known for it’s crossovers. It’s part of the reason why the game is as popular as it is today.
It’s not the first game to do crossovers, it's been around about as long as gaming has, in the form of easter eggs, joke characters, or whole games dedicated to them. The easter eggs are usually just small cameos you don't pay attention to like Doomguy's body in Duke Nukem, or the Killer Bunny from Monty Python in Minecraft. The joke characters ain't meant to be taken seriously, like Darth Maul in Tony Hawk or Scorpion and Sub Zero in NBA Jam. Those rarely make sense and are intentionally silly. If they're playable, they're usually referred to as "guest characters". The ones with whole games dedicated to them include Marvel vs. Capcom, Kingdom Hearts, or Super Smash Bros. They usually have massive in-world explanations for what's happening, it's all in someone's imagination and/or it usually ain't canon to whatever series is involved. Some of them made sense, (Link in Soul Calibur 2), and some didn't (Freddy Kreuger in Mortal Kombat 9). That was the way most crossovers were; rare, cool, if silly sides of the main game. Fortnite wasn't the first game to feature guest characters, but it was the first to do it on this big of a scale. Every season there's a collab, if not in the Battle Pass, then the Item shop. It's to the point where most of the stuff in the game after Chapter 3, Season 3 is a collab.
Other games like Call of Duty, Fall Guys, and strangely Overwatch 2 have followed in its hyper-monetized footsteps. So it stands to reason that in a game with so many, a few of them might be bad.
A crossover, if done right, can be a cool moment, add a bit of variety to the game, and enrich the stories of both worlds. I feel like Fortnite overdoes collabs and because of that it doesn’t really have much of its own identity. They feel less like organic introductions of familiar characters into a new world and more like a company collecting recognizable names and brands to try and keep their game relevant. I think that’s why they call them “collabs” instead of “crossovers” or "guest characters". They’re collaborations between Epic Games and whatever the other franchises parent company is. They do them so often that they’re not special anymore. They do them because they know that in a time where things get worse, people are comforted by nostalgia, the past. So their interpretation of it, is that if we put something familiar and established in front of them, they'll spend a crap ton of money on it. They thought it was financially better to do that than to risk an original idea potentially flopping. Whether or not they make sense doesn’t say anything about the quality of the skins. The artists at Epic do a really good job with their designs. They have several iconic original characters such as Fishstick, Peely, Midas, Meowscles, Meowskulls, Dr. Sloan, Brite Bomber, and Jonesy. If they focused more on them, the original skins, they’d have more of their own identity. So I decided to analyze this trend of excessive crossovers, by individually going over each skin featured in the originator of this trend Fortnite. I'll give my opinion on whether they make sense in the game or not. If I think any of your favorite skins don’t make sense, don't take it personally, I imagine a lot of these are fun to play in game. My main skin was Catwoman and she didn’t make a lot of sense. It doesn’t actually feel like you’re playing as like Superman or the Hulk, it feels like you’re just playing as people that look like them. With Marvel and DC characters in the same game, you'd think everybody'd be losing their minds, and yet we ain't. Crossovers happen so often that they're no longer special. I feel like Fortnite is trying to do a Ready Player One thing and homogenize all media. They kind of want to do everything as shown by the Lego, Concert, and Race mode. You want to play a survival game, don’t play Minecraft, play Fortnite. You want a rhythm, don’t play Guitar Hero or Rock Band, play Fortnite. You want a racing game, don’t play Mario Kart or Forza, play Fortnite. Even before all that there was a gamemode that was basically just 3D Among Us. It was such a blatant rip-off that Epic eventually had to give Innersloth credit for that mode. Disney buying a part of Epic also supports this and the implications on the gaming industry are scary.
Criteria
There’s no lore issue as the game takes place on an island near the Zero Point, the origin of all creation in the Omniverse. The Omniverse contains all fiction and our world. The biggest factors are whether or not the characters fit in with the tone, if u can see them using multiple types of weapons, and if it doesn’t contradict the lore of the original story. I'll also consider the items that come with that character, but I won't look at emoticons or graffiti. Those are elements that are up to the player. I will look at the loading screens just to point them out and maybe use them as criteria occasionally. I’ll also consider if they fit alongside the original characters. I’m not gonna immediately dismiss all the historical characters or others that don’t have access to guns in their world as there are medieval and samurai original characters in the game, so these things don’t matter as much. I’ll try to think about if they’d use guns if they had access to them. I know that Fortnite has a lot of different modes these days but most of these analyses will be based off of Battle Royale. I’ll include the characters, if they do or don’t, or only sort of make sense and the reasons for that. In the ones that don’t make sense, I’ll recommend different games where it makes more sense and you feel more like that character or the character is better represented if not playable. I won't say anything about the skins based off of real people.
If you want to find a specific character, search up their name on the blog and you'll probably find them.
Examples of characters that wouldn’t fit:
Characters from dark and/or realistic franchises
Characters that only use one type of weapon or none at all
Characters that have powers/equipment that go unused, or act out of character in any way (especially if including them would make the game unbalanced)
Characters who’s inclusion would take away from the game or their original story
Status Posts
Every ten skins I cover, i'll make a post updating the stats in terms of numbers for those that care about it. How many skins i've covered so far, how many of them make sense and don't make sense, the percentages of both, the amount of alternate games recommended and the titles of those games. You can usually find it if you search my blog and look up "status report" or "shark jumping contest results".
Conclusion
At the end of the day, this blog is just a place for me to ramble and over analyze fictional characters. It’s not meant to be taken ultra-seriously. I’m mostly doing this cause I’m bored and I don’t know how often I’ll upload. Please enjoy.
References:
Collaborations (commonly referred to as Collabs by fans) are official crossovers of other media outside of the Fortnite brand being introduc
Important Addendum:
I decided to address this now rather than later. I'm sure that those of y'all that saw the blog noticed me reposting fundraisers for those in Palestine. This was unintentional, it was meant to be posted to a different blog I have. I initially planned for this to be just an entertainment blog while I posted about serious stuff to a different blog. Though, if me posting it to this blog got those people help that they need then I was glad I did it. I've now decided to use the platform, what little I have of a platform, to try and raise awareness to mutual aid campaigns while also doing silly analysis. For those that might get upset cause i'm "making it political", the only thing I have to say is, Don't Expect this Blog to be Apolitical! This blog was political from the moment that I created it. Throughout this intro and most of the blog entries so far, I criticized a lot of the skins as being blatant commercialism. This idea of putting in skins or crossovers cause of brand recognition that has infected almost every facet of the industry is just one of the surface level symptoms of late stage capitalism in AAA gaming. The fact that these skins exist could be part of a conversation on art and creativity under capitalism. If I make a post where a character doesn't make sense, I'm usually gonna criticize the entertainment industry and the economy. I've criticized Disney and Marvel as companies, I said Free Palestine in the first post I made, and I criticized the commercialism in the US around Halloween. If I talk about aspects of one social issue, several others are also on the table. I know we all love escapism and we need it sometimes, but at the same time, you can't ignore the problems in the world that are infinitely more important than anything I talk about here. It's always been important to address them because I live in the same world that these things are happening. It's become even more important because of the colonization of Palestine, the exploitation in the Congo, the Genocide in Sudan, the theocracy in/bombing of Iran, and how immigrants are being treated in my own country, the United States. With that being said, this blog will still mostly be Fortnite, but with the addition of fundraisers at the end of a few of the posts. It won't be every post, but it'll be often. I'm sure y'all are aware that Disney now owns a part of Epic Games. You already know how I feel about that company. It's cause of this that I don't recommend you buy any of the skins in Fortnite that come back to the Item Shop, even the ones that I have positive things to say about. This blog ain't promotion for these skins, it's just my analysis of this pattern of excessive crossovers that started in Fortnite. I don't make any kind of money from doing this nor am I being paid to do it. This is just a little side blog of me cataloguing the game, and how it could be different or better with their crossovers. I'll also bring up how they'd be different if things were changed. With that being said, consider donating to any campaigns I post if you have the means to do so, and please enjoy my ramblings.
