Dude the way you could imagine any kind of crossover with jttw and it would work. Those guys get into so many side quests already, why not have them meet Twilight Sparkle from MLP or Tanjiro from Demon Slayer it genuinely wouldn't be too out of left field. I find that so fun
Okay so I hope you will all forgive me for waxing pedantic on a fun "what-if" type ask, BUT I GOTTA, you guys, I am an enormous mythology geek and this stuff is so fascinating to me, and JttW does it SO WELL, I have to gush for a bit. Because it's such a bizarre and rich world they're traveling through; anything is possible! It's an amazing strength of the novel and is probably why JttW is so infinitely adaptable. Look at @the-monkey-ruler's vast collection! JttW with robots! With romance! With lots of angsty political commentary! With, why not, MLP!
Part of why Anything Goes in JttW is the extremely clever tonal balance between religious allegory, action-adventure, and straight-up goofy comedy. If it's funny and exciting, it's allowed! But the part I want to talk about here is how basically the whole book from the moment Sanzang leaves the Great Tang takes place in a weird suspended liminal universe.
So I think everyone's familiar with the idea of liminal spaces, yes? We mostly think of them in modern transportation terms: airport terminals, bus stations, that sort of thing. And there are LOTS of the medieval equivalent of those spaces in JttW: ferries across rivers, narrow canyons through mountains, city gates and post-houses...these transportation choke points/ crossroads are where plenty of subplots kick off! Gotta get your passport stamped before you can continue!
But they also exist spiritually/ mentally. They are the thresholds, the transition points, when a person or a soul is most vulnerable. It's best to have a ritual or a guide. It's unwise to venture into these spaces intentionally, because you may never get out again, or you may come out...different.
Every culture has these spaces somewhere in its mythos. Sometimes it's just: "we throw a party once the baby has crossed the '100 day barrier'" (Chinese), or, "carry the bride across the threshold of your new home because if she stumbles in that crucial transition your marital life is cursed" (Roman), or, "you should have a priest with you on your deathbed" (Catholic, Tibetan Buddhism, plenty others). But sometimes they're physical places you can get to, intentionally or otherwise: the Otherworld, faerie-land, the mirror-country, the realm of the gods.
Think of Odysseus trying to get home. He's traveling from Troy to Ithaca. Not that far. Easily mapped. Except he's clearly NOT traveling on familiar local seas; he's making his way through a kind of alternate-Aegean, where there are oceans and islands and beaches, but there are also monsters and whirlpools and gods at every turn. He's one step to the left of reality. The maps don't work anymore.
That's the same kind of space that JttW occupies, the moment Sanzang leaves the Great Tang. Because he agreed first and foremost to a spiritual journey. That's what a pilgrimage is. So he can't just walk the 1,800 miles to India, he has to cover 108,000 miles of Otherworld-- a place brimful of TESTS AND TRIALS. Lucky him. :)
Here's an extra cool bit: it's not just an Otherworld; there are plenty of hints to suggest it's THE Otherworld--i.e., the afterlife.
In many ways, especially for the purposes of allegory, the pilgrims in JttW are performing a katabasis, a descent into the underworld. They're going WEST, after all--the direction of the setting sun. To "Go West," is a euphemism for death in several cultures, particularly ancient Egypt, where the dead were buried in the western desert. Also, Sanzang's primary guide is a monkey-- an animal often depicted as a psychopomp in east & southeast Asia.
Katabasis/ death & rebirth is a big important mytheme in a ton of different cultures, and is usually performed by a god/ shaman/ hero, whose purpose is often a kind of conquest of death itself: bringing back hope, information, a ritual or elixir, a person...the Buddhist scriptures that will redeem the dead. And what is enlightenment after all but a kind of death and rebirth?
There is a reason SO FREAKING MANY JttW demons live in caves--it's not just spooky ambience! Caves are halfway between this world and the underworld. Aeneas, wanting to talk to the dead, descends into a cave; Native American mythos feature caves as places of emergence from a previous world & cenotes as chthonic passages; multiple volcanoes are portrayed as portals to hell, etc. Furthermore, caves are a kind of dwelling halfway between civilized human buildings and raw nature: very fitting for demons, who are halfway-creatures themselves, sentient but not human. (I think it's particularly interesting that Sun Wukong's Water-Curtain Cave has human-style buildings and even furniture & dishes when he finds it! He gets to start off closer to human than most demons. Then again, he's a monkey, which is itself a kind of halfway thing between human and animal...)
So even if the Journey isn't a katabasis, it's very definitely fascinated by threshold spaces and places and people. (The way that mountains are depicted the world over as being axis mundi/ halfway between Heaven and Earth/ sacred wild spaces? The way that rivers are barriers and passages to the afterlife and methods of leaving one's old self behind? The way that JttW is OBSESSED with mountains and rivers as places of Trial?)
And that makes perfect sense: it's a journey. It's a story of transition and becoming.
And the thing about journeys is, you might just run into anything on your way. :)
