How was her characterisation?

Fine, but it was a very very short piece, part of the seven-part apocalyptic series she wrote in honor of Apocalypse Later. But I think maybe that's the problem -- the crossover only really works if you have the time to build into it, and work at smoothing the incongruities.

the writing isn't as smooth as the integration, I think.

No, but those sorts of things rarely are. I'm a little more flexible when it comes to be plotty adventure pieces like this, willing to cut the writing some slack if I can tell it's a bang-up job plot-wise.

Yeah. Maayan wrote a short piece with O'Neill and Buffy and vampires and stuff, and I told her I had a real hard time getting over the incongruities.

You mean the stealth crossover in Five Billion Years Of Sunshine? I admit, I really didn't 'get' that segment. I had no clue what the hell Jack was doing there, and the future tense kind of threw me off. I love all other segments in the story though, especially the one with the transsexual and the Sam & Teal'c one with that killer last line.

BK the Irregular, who wrote The Scarab, spent a lot of time establishing links between two worlds--The Nish'ta bit and how that gets incorporated into Buffyverse was particularly clever, I thought--and she/he had a really nice grasp on both the Buffyverse and SGverse dialog rhythm. The voices and characterizations were spot-on.

Okay, now that's fucking depressing.

t beams

I was bemoaning my fate with Viv over Mexican the other night, that I'd locked myself into this with a throw-away line at the end of the Teal'c snippet. And I can't go back, because it was definitely omniscient voice there. Argh.

No retconning, no.

Sigh. What I really want to do is to encourage you to call a mulligan and get around it--give the guy amnesia again and say no no, I meant what happened to him that day! or something--but I cannot in good conscience do that. Oh well.

You could always go the quantum mirror route, I suppose, but that would require rather more plot than I think you're wanting to write.

The voices and characterizations were spot-on.

I don't like the Riley, and Teal'c was never meant to talk this much, but I see why the plot requires it.

Mostly it's their internal stuff that feels off to me. The dialogue's not distracting.

I'm also adoring where the specialities overlap.

He, actually.

Which makes me think about why so many big plotty crossovers are written by guys, and does it have to do with the endless argument about whether the Enterprise would survive a run-in with the Death Star, and so forth...

why so many big plotty crossovers are written by guys

Andrew ... fic ...

I'm just saying.

I had no clue what the hell Jack was doing there, and the future tense kind of threw me off.

It was... ah, that was the one that was the fallout from the episode with the bugs, where Teal'c got bit and was gonna sprout thousands of bugs, right? So her premise was that they didn't find him in time, and he did, and the bugs took over Colorado, and ... I forget. Something about the vampires.

Katie's "In the Wrong Story" totally has the sex scene. In my head.

That's a little weird, right? It's okay. I've accepted it.

In the end, it was the over-paralleling that kicked me out of The Scarab. For now, anyway. The long Riley=Jack apologia is jarring. Especially since I don't see it at all.

I must have skimmed that part, ita. I was mostly reading for plot, which I liked.

The story did suffer from what I tend to think of as First Story Syndrome, where the writer feels the need to hit on all the character's hot topics, so we got references to Teal'c's Sholva status, Charlie's death, Share, and so forth. That got a little old.

But in general, it was an ambitious story that managed to integrate both universes, set up an interesting conflict, hold the suspense, and use just about every character in a way that made sense for them. For that, I'll cut them some slack on imperfect voices and the occasional anvil-thumping.