@drakonig sent: 🔥 crossovers
send me 🔥 for an unpopular opinion!
OKAY SO, I MAY COME OFF AS BIASED IN STATING THIS. I'm someone who has been primarily writing in the crossover community from the start, not just on tumblr but on various platforms. One of the first roleplays I partook in was a mass-media crossover where you could write whoever you wanted on a Zoo Tycoon 2 fan-forum. I was ten years-old, but it was fun as shit and I won't deny that regardless of how cringey me and my fellow partners were.
As for my tumblr experiences, I have, for the most part, mainly written OCs or canons from vague or small fandoms. I'm used to writing outside of my muse's fandom because I've had to be. Professor Layton, SRMTHFG, Kubo and the Two Strings? Those are all fandoms that have been and currently are insanely tiny at the very most in the roleplay community.
I've been here for ten years. I've seen whole fandoms come and go. I remember when Frozen first came out and everyone was writing muses from that film. Steven Universe? Had a huge presence back when it was still popular. Hell, even more recently, Encanto, The Owl House, etc. had huge booms in the community.
What I noticed about these fandoms though, and this is coming from an outside perspective, is that they died off rather quickly once the hype wore off and/or the official media stopped being published. Now with some of the fandoms I mentioned above, there were some factors that I've been told have led to a lot of these groups dissolving, and not just having to do with the media ending. So I won't get into that.
But one thing that these fandoms all had in common with one another is that they seemingly only interacted within their own fandom. As someone who has been here for so long, I gotta tell you, being able to interact with other muses in your own fandom is a freaking luxury that I think a lot of people take for granted. Fandoms like Pokemon and the Legend of Zelda continue to survive because their media is both extremely popular and also still having new content introduced to it. But from what I've seen, fandoms where most people only interact with other muses in that same fandom? Honestly don't last long in the rpc. I'm not trying to sound harsh, or negative or criticizing. This is a genuine observation that I've made over the ten years or so of tumblr roleplaying.
Inevitably, unless you have the luxury of your muse being in a massive, ongoing fandom in the rpc, you're going to have to eventually be comfy with the idea of crossovers, or otherwise find a different platform or muse to roleplay in. If you're not comfy with crossovers, that's absolutely valid, but from what I've seen, the nature of the tumblr rpc is so fluid.
Me? I personally love crossovers. Can't get enough of em. But I want others in the rpc to be thankful of when they have others in their fandom to roleplay with, and especially have the ability to limit themselves to in-fandom interactions.
tldr: i am not saying crossovers are the superior rp method. everyone has their own preferences. however i do notice that rp blogs / muses who are comfy with crossovers + fandomless interactions tend to survive and adapt far easier than others. shout out to my homies who have had to do crossovers because their fandom is so tiny.
