My theory is that people waste time on setup because that's the part the makes them feel clever. "Look, I have done such a realistic job getting Harry and Hermione onto the Starship Enterprise, nobody would ever guess that they weren't part of the same world."

fwiw, I actively enjoy a clever sewing-together of 'verses. And have problems suspending disbelief when the crossover requires one of the 'verses to have its rules rewritten/canon be glossed over - or when there's no explanation at all.

Which - totally ymmv, and yay for everyone having their own beautiful cake. But I'm balking a bit at dismissing this sewing-together as self-congratulatory timewasting.

And have problems suspending disbelief when the crossover requires one of the 'verses to have its rules rewritten/canon be glossed over - or when there's no explanation at all.

That's definitely a problem, too. I don't write fanfiction, much less crossovers, but getting the two (or more) universes involved together in a way that works and pleases most people has got to be very difficult. I can't think of too many crossovers where there wasn't at least some mild bending of canon, but a crossover is, to me, ultimately an AU story anyway so some bending is allowed in my mind.

And sometimes it's the buildup that's the fun part! Seeing how you can in fact put character X into scenario Y and make it feel natural.

But then, I'm a sucker for crossovers and AUs.

Ailleann spoke for me in that post.

I tend to be a hard sell for crossovers. The ones that work for me are set with canon characters in a familiar 'verse, and you begin to notice a background character, or characters. They fit into the current canon, but there's something recognizable and familiar about them as they pass through, or become less relegated to background. It gives a little frisson when you do recognize them, and realize they've managed to fit right in for the most part and are incognito in the current 'verse. I like that moment of recognition, and give the writer props for cleverness, deftness and the tidy melding of 'verses.

But that's just me and what I like.

I spend too much time, probably. But I loved it when my cop show posse told me "I totally got that, and I'm Buffy virgin!1!." (My fandoms...don't overlap very much.)

I'm balking a bit at dismissing this sewing-together as self-congratulatory timewasting.

Well, I didn't say that. I think that a certain amount of sewing-together is necessary. But for a lot of readers, I think, it's not the point of the crossover: the point is the characters banging into each other (errrm, yes, that way too).

When I've written crossovers I haven't spent a lot of time moving people around, frankly, but then having space ships allows one to insert a bit of handwavium: "This is very far away from where she had been before, and the people are funny." And then the story starts.

By which I mean, I start with the assumption it's the same universe, and work from there to resolve the geography/chronological issues.

I know you didn't say that, 'Suela - but I felt that Am Chau rather did:

My theory is that people waste time on setup because that's the part the makes them feel clever.

If I'm misunderstanding, Am Chau, then I apologise.

I've got no quibbles with what you said about preferring to get on to the collision of characters, and I'm certainly not suggesting you need to justify your writerly or readerly preferences. Like I said - yay for there being myriad different beautiful cakes.

I may well be in a minority, and I'm good with that - but I have read crossovers where the handwavium prevented me from enjoying the story.* And since that readerly POV hadn't been represented in the discussion, this was why I spoke up - not in order to say "Hey, your priorities are wrong!" but just to say "Okay, but there's no need to diss people with different priorities."

God, I sound like a pedantic dickhead. Really not trying to bitchslap anyone here, I swear, but I seem to be coming across that way. Sorry.

* Plenty of times you don't even NEED to provide any explanation, because the 'verses dovetail neatly - but in the Harry Potter/Star Trek example Am Chau gave, you kind of DO, at least for me to enjoy the story. So I don't think that it's extraneous. (AJ Hall's Harry Potter/Vorkosigan crossovers don't really work for me for precisely this reason - I'm enjoying the characters' interactions, but I'm also frantically going "...but, but wtf? how? why? what? how?" and that gets in the way of enjoying the stories.) Clearly, though, YMMV. Which is really all I was trying to say.

I haven't read a lot of fiction but my biggest complaint has been that things I've read were too short. My most favorite story so far was I think 75% told before we met any of the characters from the original work.

There's quite a lot of novel-length fic out there too, Laga - if you tell us what fandoms you favour, I bet people could rec you some longer stuff.