Title: They Had Crossbows
Author: VampireCow
Rating: FR13
Genre: Action/Adventure, Drama, Friendship.
Status: WIP
Summary: Having fallen through a rift brought on by Wilkins' death, pint-sized Scoobies find themselves in a world where the supernatural is commonplace. Throw in sneaky governments, power-hungry vamps, and over-protective lycanthropes, it could almost be home.
Link: Here

I found this gem when I was browsing TtH yesterday, I found the plot of it to be rather good.

This story may not be for everyone considering that the Scoobies has had their bodies regressed to ten year old's, and I know that some people dislike these kind of stories.

That aside, the story is one of the best BTVS/Anita Blake crossovers I have had the pleasure of reading so it gets 5/5 from me.

 

This was good at first, but the last few chapters have felt pretty weak to me. It started off with some madcap antics, but now its all angst and posing and fucking hyenas. If this doesn't turn back around it could be the Anita Blake series all over again (in a bad way).

 

Is this one of those "mama Anita" stories? Usually the kids are younger than 10 in those, but it sounds similar.

 

This is NOT a mama Anita story. It's actually not too bad.

Buffy, Xander, Willow, and Oz, are sucked through to an Anitaverse immediately after killing Mayor Wilkins. For reasons never explained, they're stuck in 10yo bodies. Oz's werewolf transformation is only a day or two away, so they register him into a government safehouse for the full moon, which turns out to be a mistake when the safehouse won't give Oz back afterwards. The three remaining Scoobies launch an audacious jailbreak on the safehouse which gains them the unwanted attention of law enforcement, the media, and the preternatural community.

I haven't spoiled much of the story at all. VampireCow starts Ch 1 with a brief mention of the jailbreak, and then gets straight to the reactions and the plot unfolds from there. The setup that I mentioned is revealed piecemeal throughout the fic.

The first 2/3 of the fic has its ups and downs. The overly-protective maternal/paternal feeling that just about everyone who meets the kids feels, except perhaps Jean-Claude, is the most grating element here. The Scoobies are in their 10yo bodies, but still carry all of their old world scars, just for extra emo and sympathy from the adults. Aside from that gripe, the major part of this fic is pretty good.

The characterisation of the Scoobies isn't very good. It's passable, but they never really come into their own. The author never seems certain as to whether she wants them to behave like the young adults they were in the series, or like ten year olds. The section of the story dealing with Xander freaking out over clowns really drove home the author's lack in this department.

The plot is undisciplined. Some plot threads are started and randomly dropped, and in the last 1/3 of the fic the plot of the Scoobies being on the run is very disjointed. I'm not really sure what was happening there, why they had split up for several scenes, or the nature of the place/s[?] that they were hiding in.

There are some other incongruities, such as using mirrors to communicate in the dark, and the Scoobies, 90s kids, knowing about rickrolling, etc.

The fate of Sunnydale was pretty awesome. The entire town has essentially been black bagged. No one is allowed in or out, the place is [or was?] overrun by revenant vampires and is essentially a no go zone. The media has a standing blackout on the fate of Sunnydale.

The scenes that were occasionally shown from the Buffyverse world of Anya and Giles dealing with a Scooby-less world seemed to come without rhyme or reason. I'm not sure that there was any point to those.

There have been a number of these Buffy-characters-in-Anitaverse fics, and this one doesn't really add anything new to the genre. It is however, the best written fic of its type that I've read, and with 85k words there is a lot to read here.

If you're only going to read one Buffy/Anitaverse fic, then this is it.

I liked the fic a lot more than my review might indicate. I'm not sure why I like these kinds of fics. I think it's the adventure. It gets 4/5 from me.