So, I wrote some fanfic called Azeroth Comes to Remnant. A cross-over of the game World of Warcraft and the anime RWBY. Essentially, I grabbed some of my Warcraft characters and threw them into the RWBY universe. Doing so was actually quite tricky. First and foremost was bringing the magic systems together in a logical way that didn’t contradict either story-line and after that was making it so that both story lines hung together.
In Warcraft there is magic, different types of magic of course, but still magic. there is the magic of the Light used by priests and paladins, Fel magic used by warlocks, Arcane magic used by mages and the Elemental magic used by shamans. All of these are represented by the use of mana.
In RWBY there was, when I started writing, there was supposedly no magic. What there was was Dust that, when used through a person’s soul, allowed super human like feats such as being faster, stronger, summoning and controlling things and elements (Fire, ice, etc). Yep, sounded like magic to me as well and so I declared Dust to be solidified mana for the story. This looks to be a simple fix but I still had complications arising mostly due to the multiple classes of Warcraft and the single class of Hunter in RWBY.
Of course, after the death of Monty Oum who was the main inspiration for RWBY, the new writers did bring in magic but they limited it to some historically significant figures. Go figure.
And then there was hanging the two stories together. Why were the heroes of Azeroth upon Remnant?
For this I took a piece of lore from Warcraft and applied it to Remnant in that the titans were once living worlds. In fact, in Legion, Azeroth has been identified as larval titan but Legion happened after my story. So, anyway, I made Remnant a larval titan as well and sent the Azerothians across to protect her and to teach the native inhabitants how to protect her as well.
Protecting her became more complex because, as the seasons of RWBY continued, it came about that the gods that had created Remnant had also left an ultimatum: Be peaceful or we’ll destroy the whole world and start again.
Actually, the continuing story of RWBY is what caused the writing to take so long. My initial point was to make my story fit within the story of RWBY but that became impossible and I finally had to go full AU (Alternate Universe).
And then there’s my reason, my inspiration for even writing it.
You see, in RWBY there was a pack of wandering scum going round killing, kidnapping and stealing which they justified by the saying: The Strong Survive
This is, of course, a massive misrepresentation of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Unfortunately its also a fairly common one and one that I’ve seen parroted by numerous people including some wannabe politicians. Seeing this misrepresentation in RWBY irritated me enough to write.
Darwin’s theory can be summarised as The Fittest Survive. A wandering bunch of murderers don’t, of course, fit and that’s evolution.