YugiohStuck - The Things That Go Into Writing Crossovers
Hey there! It’s Griever.
You probably know me from one of three things - Yugiohstuck, which I just started putting out into the world, Jojostuck, the fanventure I wrote and shoved into everyone’s collective faces, or Eridan’s Pesterquest Route, my sole official contribution to Homestuck. If you’ve enjoyed any of these, I want to say this real quick - thank you very much!
Right now, though, we’re in the commentary zone here. And that means that I’m going to dump out my thoughts on my own work, my (frankly extremely messy) process, and probably just start gushing about things that I do that nobody else will really understand super well. Sound good? Of course it does, y’all are in for a wild ride.
For the record, Yugiohstuck, the main piece to which this is the companion, can be found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23914477. Please give it a read, even if you don’t know a damn thing about Yugioh - I promise it’s just as hilarious if you go in fresh. Who knows, maybe it’ll even get you watching something new this month, while we’re all Homestuck.Let’s begin, shall we?
My style of writing really gravitates to injecting as much humor into the dialogue at any given time as I possibly can. This is the first fucking line of this fic and already, Dave’s talking about Obama. Look, Dave. Just because Obama is the Homestuck president doesn’t mean he’s the Yugioh president, does he? I mean, Yugioh came out in the States in the early 2000’s - he wasn’t quite there yet.
I usually put a bit of thought into how mixing two pieces of media into a single crossover fic would lead to a change in the setting. Jojostuck took place in the 1980’s, and across multiple different countries, so I did want to do a little bit of research on things to make sure things didn’t feel wrong. Also, there’s a lot of moments in Jojostuck where Egbert just constantly goes on about how there’s movies in the 90s that Rose and Eridan could look forward to, since they’re from the [S] GAME OVER timeline, and thus have knowledge about things up to 2009.
Yugioh, however, doesn’t feel entirely locked into any given time period. (Frankly, I’m still waiting on my fully functioning holographic projection Duel Disks.) Because of that, it doesn’t really feel wrong for me to change some specifics about the premise - Dave can talk about Obama. He can talk about cards that weren’t released when Yugioh first came out. Hell, I made all of them college age instead of high school age, since literally not a single thing about the story would change if the cast were a bunch of dumb college students like myself.
Personally, whenever I write dialogue, it mostly involves me just getting into the fucking heads of these characters and figuring out what they’d say. Rose, Dave, and Dirk are probably the easiest for me to write, since they all have a tendency to ramble on in a stream-of-consciousness manner with varying filters from their mind to their mouths. (Dave has no filter, Rose has the strongest one.)
The most important thing about writing my dialogue is finding when other characters would interrupt. No, I’m serious here. I write with a lot of characters who would ramble on and run out of steam if they weren’t stopped by another character at some point - and THAT is the precise moment that you get Karkat, or Jake, or June chiming in with a snide remark that makes you laugh your ass off.
Less important is getting into the voice of the characters themselves. It might just be because I’ve grown so accustomed to their voices over the years, but I feel like anyone who’s been into Homestuck for a while will have a lot less trouble just slipping into the voice of any given character. Honestly, having the text color and typing quirks of each character does a LOT of the work in making you feel like any character is themselves. I think Jake is probably one of the voices I’m least accustomed to writing, and that’s largely because I don’t know how regularly I should slip into his wilder mannerisms, nor how to do that very well. Damn Jake and his old man slang!
I was never much a fan of having human versions of trolls interact with humans even in fanfics, to be honest. I’d much rather them just be an interspecies mingling without any explanation whatsoever. Same with Cherubs, though Calliope is next chapter.
That’s an Ojama, by the way. It really is just a weird small disgusting alien in a speedo. I might’ve gone a little overboard with just pasting in pictures of Yugioh cards, but sometimes it’s just hard to describe every Yugioh monster I want to be thrown onto the board. It’s MUCH easier than drawing them, too, so I feel like it’s a happy medium.
I don’t know if I’ll return to drawing things that actually go INSIDE the fic itself, since it is really time consuming. ESPECIALLY for something like Yugiohstuck. Half the reason I love Yugioh is because of the complex monster designs, but do you think I can draw that shit? How am I supposed to draw Dirk and the Dark Magician making dramatic card game poses when I can’t even draw the Dark Magician’s stupid hat? Seriously, that shit fucking sucks.
That said, I definitely do want to try my hand at some parts later, so who knows? We’ll see. For now, though, get used to seeing a lot of cards get dumped on-screen.
Narration is a lot of fun when it’s got a lot of Dirk. He’s just such a pretentious dickhead all the time.
Dirk is a lot softer in Yugiohstuck, since he has amnesia and doesn’t remember who he was at all. Keyword being “softer”, and NOT “soft”, because like. He still tears apart people’s souls because that’s what he knows how to do.
When it comes to Yugioh, there’s a sharp divide between the Pharaoh that we see on the main show - the one you probably remember from 4kids on Saturday mornings - and the one that we see in the early parts of the manga. The manga of Yugioh actually has like, 50 chapters before it gets to the arcs of the Yugioh we all recognize. Back then, it was about much more broad games, and the spirit of the Millenium Puzzle was just constantly fucking people’s minds up with magic. Like, he has one game with a dude that was holding Tea at gunpoint where they each choose one finger to kill each other with, and he sets the guy on fire with a lighter by going to light his cigarette and instead dropping it on his hand pouring alcohol.
IT’S FUCKING NUTS.
Anyways, obviously he eventually comes to mellow out, believe in his friends, become softer because of Yugi, etc. But he’s basically Jigsaw in those early chapters, because that’s sort of the purpose he’s been imbued with before he attempts to do any introspection about himself as a separate being.
That’s why it’s so interesting to work with Dirk in the same confines. Dirk, in general, prefers to have something keeping him occupied. He works BEST under pressure of death, which is why he excels so well with [S] Unite and [S] Synchronize by putting together a massive convoluted plan to kiss all his friends and save all their lives by astral projecting himself into dream reality or something. And he’s at his lowest when he’s forced to sit around, waiting, introspecting, thinking about his purpose, or whether he even has one. In Yugiohstuck, he’s given a very clear purpose that he does very well in - dueling. And as the spirit of the Millenium Puzzle, he doesn’t have to get into awkward interactions with people if he doesn’t want to. But it does leave him with a looooot of downtime.
Just like the pharaoh, he’s morbidly curious about who he’s supposed to be - who he was - and that lack of sense of self is killing him.
This right here is why I think crossovers are so exhilarating to think about. It’s a really good way for me to analyze Homestuck characters through the lens of another piece of media. Or, the other way around - analyzing other characters through that good god damn Homestuck lens. I certainly never thought that much about Yugi from Yugioh before I started writing this, outside of the fact that his hair might be the most intense vision of anime hair in existence.
Crossovers are probably at their best when it’s two sets of characters interacting heavily with each other, which is why I try to keep at least a couple characters from Yugioh or Jojo intact. But I’m pretty heavily biased towards the Homestuck cast, since they’re probably my favorite cast of characters in literally anything?
To anyone that hasn’t seen Yugioh, yes, Kaiba’s abusive billionaire stepfather was a war profiteer arms dealer. Yes, Kaiba did a corporate takeover through share manipulation and his stepfather threw himself out of a window to teach him some kind of weird fucked up lesson about death awaiting the loser of a battle. And yes, he pivoted ENTIRELY from war machines to holographic card games. And absolutely, he is still a gigantic fucking asshole.
Kaiba’s probably my favorite billionaire in all of fiction because in spite of all his sympathetic traits, he is almost always painted as a huge asshole. More importantly, he is flashy. He is dramatic. He’s basically like the rage of millions of eSports players personified, he fucking WANTS that salty runback with Yugi. If you haven’t seen Yugioh, I’m going to go ahead and tell you right now that he funds a massive elevator into space so that he can rebuild the Millenium Puzzle in zero-gravity, and when that doesn’t work, he shoots himself into the Ancient Egyptian afterlife SOLELY TO DUEL HIS RIVAL. He wants that win so fucking bad, y’all.
It’s a little gay, not gonna lie.
Jane’s a lot less homoerotically pulled towards Dirk, because that’d be weird for a million different reasons. But she DOES have all those Kaiba trappings to her. Cutthroat business skills, an intimidating stature in life, far too much money, and most importantly, a skeptical outlook on all things to suit her views, even those that have been disproven. Magic just isn’t real in Jane’s world.
I feel like Jane in Yugiohstuck is somewhere in between Nanna and Jane - she grew up ultimately indoctrinated into her ruthless business tycoon heiress position, and sort of relishes it, unlike Nanna. But unlike the Jane we’re all used to, she’s also far more resentful and angry at the more disgusting parts of the Condesce’s old business, and tears it down to instate her own personal hobbies as a show of power. Would she turn out to be this much of a gamer were she in between the Jane-Nanna extremes of Jane Crocker? Probably not, but hey, this is an alternate universe. Sometimes things be like that.
When it comes to my actual writing process, I am a fucking mess. When I write something I think is funny, I really, REALLY just want to show it off right then, as a short little snippet. If you’ve been in a discord server with me, you might’ve seen me do this on numerous occasions with random out-of-context snippets of fics or self-contained bits of dialogue.
If you’re writing your own fanfic, whatever it may be, it’s probably honestly still a good idea to show people what you’re writing as you write it. This way, not only can you get good feedback on how things sound or how the story flows, but you can also now have an outlet for that whole “I want to show this to somebody” feeling you might have. Ask a friend to be a beta reader of your stuff - and if they can’t read the whole thing, ask them what they think about little bits and pieces of your stuff.
I definitely sent this part to a friend or two before putting Yugiohstuck out in the world. Hell, I’ve sent a lot of snippets of earlier parts MONTHS before I got my head out of my ass long enough to knock out the last 12k words. Of course, I plan on writing the next part faster, but you know how it is.
As far as writing an ongoing project goes, I think it’s important to write a little bit every day. Even if it’s just a few sentences, it’s important to start getting into a groove if you want to start having days where you just write a ton.
That said, even if you never have those days, or have long stretches of time where you don’t write all that much, there’s absolutely no need to beat yourself up over it! You’re doing this all for yourself, and ultimately it’ll never be so huge a deal that you HAVE to get things out quickly and regularly. Do things when you want to get them done! But just in case you DO want to get things done with regularity (ie: if you’re really interested in showing other people the next chapter and you want to get it out from your head onto the page), then the tips above are definitely helpful.
Back to a little bit more specific commentary! This isn’t really how this event took place in the original Yugioh anime. Anyone who remembers the first episode will remember that Kaiba dueled Grandpa offscreen, then Grandpa was found collapsed on the floor, suddenly needing to be hospitalized. The dub doesn’t really explain very well that this is because those massive monster holograms were stressing him the fuck out.
The manga, meanwhile, had a MASSIVE arc for this whole Kaiba thing. I won’t get into too many of the details, but Kaiba forced Yugi and his friends through like, four tiers of his murder theme-park (complete with hired soldiers and a hired serial killer) before they had their absurdly tense duel, which was also the second duel between him and Yugi, rather than the first. Also, Kaiba was straight up trying to murder Yugi the entire time.
This is another instance of me taking a few liberties with the circumstances behind the largely recognizable events - Jane would probably give an old man she didn’t care about a good scare or maybe even kill him outright. But she probably wouldn’t kill Dirk, because even at this point they’ve got a strange friendship built in very stubborn gamer antagonism. Hence why I have the poison/antidote dynamic - it builds the stakes and tension that were there in the manga, while the duel itself feels like it has just about the same dynamic as the one in the show that everyone recognizes.
Honestly, it’s kinda fun working with the melding of multiple continuities. Dirk should really try it more often.
Sorry, everyone. Jane has weird feelings about clowns. That’s really all there is to say on the matter.
Honestly, I’m curious to see what people think of the duels. After the first series, the moves in any given duel become a lot more complicated, but the number of turns decreases pretty heavily. The climactic endgame duels of later series take less than 10 turns, while this one takes about 18. I plan to have later duels take way less time in general, but having a few blowout, dragged out brawls between characters is also fun.
Writing duels is a lot of fun, honestly. It’s very different from writing usual dialogue - here, I’m sort of forced to have it be thought out beforehand how the duel goes down. You might be wondering why I don’t keep the duels the same as in the original, and there’s two reasons for that. The first is that the first arc of the Yugioh anime, Duelist Kingdom, doesn’t actually have concrete card game rules, as it was written before the card game itself came out. The second is that I want to make the duels a little bit different anyways. There’s a lot of fun fucking cards out there that I can use.
As I said just now, these duels are very precisely outlined. This is because, as a card game, I can’t really just fucking wing it, can I? My process here was that I would make an outline on how each turn happens, with a few general goals. Someone summons [ICONIC MONSTER], and next turn, someone tries to get defensive and they also summon [ICONIC MONSTER], etc. Yugioh as a franchise also gets really silly about duelist playstyles being metaphors for player’s psyches, and I plan on going in on that as much as I can. Jane, for instance, has a ruthless offensive, while Dirk is a schemer who has to make the best out of his tools and stall to bide his time before he can enact his more ingenious plans.
Once I got the duel outlined, though, I could just write like a fucking madman. I think I wrote close to 3000 words every day for a couple days, out of fucking nowhere. Is it partially because the duels are long in themselves? Yes, but there’s also a lot of back and forth dialogue that just flows naturally from the outline.
In conclusion, y’all should do outlines for everything when you can. It’s really fucking useful!!!
Exodia’s iconic as fuck.
I really like that the original Yugioh has this moment where the power of friendship is juxtaposed with an instant-win forbidden sorcerer who vaporizes dragons with the palm of his hands. That’s my kind of shit.
The Pharaoh and Dirk will both eventually grow out of their affinity towards soul fuckery. But it takes a good while. Like I was saying, there’s a palpable respect between Dirk and Jane here - a friendship between the two that arises from one trying to murder the other’s grandfather, and the other retaliating with breaking their soul into a million pieces. Apparently, this leaves Manga Kaiba in a coma for literally 6 months. So...expect a little bit of that in the future, I guess.
Frankly, the tangled web of relationships gets far, far more tangled from here on out. Especially after I introduce Roxy and Calliope. God knows they’ll have some shit going on.
Anyways, I feel like this is a pretty good place to stop with my commentary. Crossovers like Yugiohstuck are a whole ass mess, but they’re an incredibly interesting mess to make sense out of. It’s like solving a puzzle with two different sets of puzzle pieces, except somehow turning it into a completely new picture of its own.
Hope you enjoyed my little bit of commentary!
