Whenever I see anyone describing a fic including characters and elements from FFX and FFX-2 as a "crossover", it makes me twitch. How can a story based entirely in a single universe be a crossover? It makes me wonder about other metafandoms, like the Buffyverse -- would people describe a story containing Buffy characters and Angel characters as a crossover? Or different installments of Star Trek, or different seasons of the same TV show?
I have wished, both in my conversations with Nay and in general, that there could be some other name for "the Spiraverse" (which is a great expression that I am totally stealing) that doesn't exclude either of the games (as using FFX as an umbrella term would) but that also makes it clear that fans can ignore X-2 canon if they want to. Some sort of umbrella solution would be my favorite, especially if we can find a way to do it that doesn't marginalize X-2 into some sort of "secondary" canon or fandom.
I think I am in an unusual position, because I am so strongly tied to both games. I think what you say above is true of many people in X/X-2 fandom: they might play around with crossing that line, but most tend to gravitate toward one or the other. And on the surface, I probably appear to fit that mold: most of my fic explicitly references the X-2 canon, and if you asked other people what my primary fandom is, they'd likely say FFX-2. But really, I consider myself to be equally tied to both "sides". (FFX is actually my favorite game; Paine and Auron tie as my favorite characters.) I am in the Spiraverse fandom, whatever form that might happen to take at a given time. And that's why I take such a hard line on wanting to see them treated as a single fandom; when the division is forced, it's much harder to play in the Spiraverse as a whole. The dilemma you describe with that Rikku/Gippal story is exactly the problem. And I actually think that forced divisions, like the one on FF.net, exacerbate the tensions between the two "sides" of the fandom.
In which I pull out a tiny bit of your awesome epic comment and pick at it
I have wished, both in my conversations with Nay and in general, that there could be some other name for "the Spiraverse" (which is a great expression that I am totally stealing) that doesn't exclude either of the games (as using FFX as an umbrella term would) but that also makes it clear that fans can ignore X-2 canon if they want to. Some sort of umbrella solution would be my favorite, especially if we can find a way to do it that doesn't marginalize X-2 into some sort of "secondary" canon or fandom.
I think I am in an unusual position, because I am so strongly tied to both games. I think what you say above is true of many people in X/X-2 fandom: they might play around with crossing that line, but most tend to gravitate toward one or the other. And on the surface, I probably appear to fit that mold: most of my fic explicitly references the X-2 canon, and if you asked other people what my primary fandom is, they'd likely say FFX-2. But really, I consider myself to be equally tied to both "sides". (FFX is actually my favorite game; Paine and Auron tie as my favorite characters.) I am in the Spiraverse fandom, whatever form that might happen to take at a given time. And that's why I take such a hard line on wanting to see them treated as a single fandom; when the division is forced, it's much harder to play in the Spiraverse as a whole. The dilemma you describe with that Rikku/Gippal story is exactly the problem. And I actually think that forced divisions, like the one on FF.net, exacerbate the tensions between the two "sides" of the fandom.